Mac OS + Parallels + Vista = sweetness – IE6

Much to my colleagues’ envy I recently took delivery of my brand spanking 17″ MacBook Pro (with a glossy screen) – an End of Financial Year gift to myself (along with an N95, see post below).  It was my hope that this upgrade would allow me to simplify and clear some desk space by replacing my need for a PC and my old Powerbook.  Being a web designer I design / develop fully on the Mac but I still need to test the sites that I develop in Internet Explorer on a PC.

First of all I found the easiest way to migrate from the Powerbook to the MacBook Pro was copying directories from one to the other via my iPod.  Note to people doing this in future: get yourself a firewire cable for this, it will save you much grief!  It took me a few experiments via wireless, external HDD and USB disk before the bright idea of using the iPod, so I wasted some time. Especially since I have 20GB of photos and 12GB of music… But it wasn’t too painful.
Luckily my timing was such that I was able to download the recently-released Parallels 3 which includes support for Windows Vista.  After a quick trip to the city to purchase Visa (the cheapest Home Basic Edition because I need nothing more than browser installations) I proceeded to put 1 and 1 and 1 together – crossing my fingers that the laptop wouldn’t start smoking as soon as I inserted a Windows install disk .

The results were suprisingly sweet.  Parallels allows you to choose between optimising across Mac OS and other installed operating systems or optimise for better Mac OS performance and the other operating systems get what’s left over.  I chose the latter, because I’m only using Vista for IE, so Vista is a little slow, but the great thing is I can still use Photoshop and other resource-hungry apps without problem while Vista is running in Parallels.  Compliance mode is pretty cool too, you can see icons for the Windows apps that are running in the OSX toolbar.

The one drawback (and it’s a big one for me and my business!!) is that Vista doesn’t run IE6 – not even a standalone version.  That’s because it is tied too closely to the XP codebase (apparently!).  Unfortunately I didn’t realise this until after I had tried to install and run it.  Which means that one third of my reason for installing Windows (the other two were IE7 and Safari for Windows) fell through.  Luckily for me my husband has a laptop that runs IE6 and he leaves it at home during the day.  I’m hoping that saturation of IE6 will reduce drastically in the near future with the release of IE7 and Safari so then I can stop supporting it.

I’m loving my environment right now – on my desktop I have a good LCD monitor which I bought about a year ago for the PC, an Apple keyboard, mouse and speakers which I plug into my one machine when I’m working in my office.  Otherwise, I unplug everything and take the laptop to my lounge or to clients’ sites and still have everything I need.

If you’re thinking of installing Parallels + Vista on your Macbook Pro, I say go for it!!