First Impressions of Parallels+Vista

So, I found out that my school has a program for CS majors that allows us to download the business class version of Vista. As a web developer (not designer) I thought it would be prudent of me to install Vista under Parallels (build 3120). Over the next couple of days/weeks/arbitrary-measures-of-time I'll be writing my thoughts and experiences/difficulties working with Vista. Just to make it interesting, I'll throw in the experiences of my roommate who is running the same install of Vista on his desktop machine (WoW just crashed his XP install...sooo).

The Install

The installation was easy under this build of Parallels. They have a tool that asks for your name/company and the serial code for Vista and takes this information, as well as the inherent networking setup, and just skips that step for you. The only thing left to do is wait for Vista to run through and do its thing. Come back in 45 minutes to an hour and you should have a running install.

Notes: I allocated 16gb of hdd space in an expanding file and 1gb of system memory. I have the Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro running at 2.16ghz

My roommate did not have such an easy time. HIs install took at least an hour and half, not including driver, etc. setup time. More on that later.

Notes: Roommate has a P4 2.4ghz processor, 1.5gb of ram and an ~40gb Vista partition.

First Impressions

Despite having some difficulty with video and sound drivers, my roommate was actually able to run Vista with all the 3D bells and whistles. Transparency and 3D transitions (like when a new window "pops" up, and they do all too frequently).

In my experience, I did not have to fiddle with any drivers, though I did not get the benefit of the proper 3D graphics and acceleration. Hopefully, either Parallels will include the correct drivers or ATI (in my case) will come out with drivers.

Coherence Mode

Amazing! I had not seen coherence work properly on a previous XP installation and only tried the button as an afterthought. Not only does it fullscreen the window and drop the background, so that the start bar from windows appears at the bottom of the screen, but, it also skips the sometimes annoying cube rotation. Granted, I like the idea of cube rotation, but it never works very smoothly when combined with a resolution change.

Wrap Up and Miscellaneous Items

My roommate is currently having an impossible time importing his music collection into Windows Media Player 11. It will play and add a song to the library that is clicked individual, but, outright refuses to scan a folder, drive, or anything else for the massive amounts of music he has. I couldn't imagine that something so basic would not work. I'm interested to see how he solves it.