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Switching to the Mac is taking strange turns lately. At the far end of the spectrum, there are people who buy top-of-the-line Macs to run Windows, like a friend of mine who’s making his Mac-fan wife green with envy over his 24″ iMac wastefully running Windows XP… A more middle of the road category of switchers is that of those who transfer their mandatory Windows environment into their new Mac thanks to Parallels.

Håvard Risvaag, who authorized me to reproduce his post to the Wordfast mailing list, is in that latter category and shared his experience folding that old PC into his new MacBook.

Since I have never used Parallels to transfer a PC to a Mac, but having instead built directly from scratch a virtual machine, I found Håvard’s testimony a very helpful addition to our knowledge base for our friends who still keep a PC side-by-side with their Mac and/or are considering upgrading to one of the new Intel machines to run their legacy PC environment. As you can see below, our Norwegian colleague is rather happy:

“Just an update, now that I’ve left the dark side.

It works like a charm, and the transition from PC to Mac was quite simple. With a new maxed-out MacBook, I bought and installed Parallels build RC3. On my old XP PC I installed a small program from Parallels, a Transport Agent allowing me to migrate the whole XP installation over to Parallels, I hooked the two machines together via Ethernet and after a while, my old PC was up and running inside my Mac. I’m rather amazed.

My relocated PC sensed that there was something new about the hardware environment, so I had to reactivate XP and Office, but otherwise it is
all the same. Only faster.

The coherence mode is great, all windows from both OS-es mixed together in utter bliss, the Windows task bar resting in bottom of the screen. Now, however, I’ve hooked an external display to the Mac, thus running OS X in full screen on the MacBook and XP in full screen on the other screen. One keyboard, one mouse, drag-and-drop between screens.

I’ll tell you if I run into trouble, but so far it’s all fine. Now I’m finally mobile.

And I’m not getting paid or anything for this ad-like post.”

Håvard wrote this piece on February 28th, and the next day, the new version of Parallels, with Coherence mode, was coming out of beta. Time to give it a look if you haven’t yet.

Don’t hesitate to share your experience or ask questions in the Comments section below or on the TransMUG list.

Written by Yves