The MacTrack – iPhone, iPod, iPod Touch and Mac News

I’ve been using Parallels desktop for a few weeks now and here are my inital impressions.

From the first moment of loading the install package I’ve been really impressed by Parallels implementation of co-hosting Windows on my Mac. From the beginning of the windows install everything has gone smoothly and without any incidents.

I choose ‘Express Install’, ‘Windows XP‘. I was prompted for my windows license key and install disk (it has to be a Service Pack 2 build – see this page for details on how to upgrade your install disk from SP1 to SP2). Parallels handled the windows install from this point onwards performing a quick and efficicent unattended install of Windows XP (no user intervention needed). After a couple of the windows instance restarts (part of the usual Windows rigmarole) I had a brand new clean windows desktop within a Mac application window.

Interestingly, of the many numerous installs I’ve done of Windows (must be well in excess of 100) this was the fastest and smoothest I’ve ever encountered.

Parallels Desktops allow you to run Windows in 3 modes:

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If you are looking for a great download manager, or a tool that improves your download speeds then take a look at iGetter (available for both Windows and Macs). iGetter integrates with your chosen web browser and takes over the handling of the download task(s).

iGetter allows you to queue up downloads, have multiple downloads running, schedule timed downloads (for example when your ISP has less traffic), resume interrupted/broken downloads (this depends on the website you are downloading from as it’s protocol dependent), and perhaps one of the most important features is iGetter can open many connections to one site, each connection or stream will download a different section of the same file, in most cases this allows for blazingly fast downloads (bandwidth allowing). Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve finally taken the plunge and installed Windows XP on my Mac (OS X 10.5.1) via boot camp. Here’s my story:

I already own a licensed copy of Windows XP so I followed the Boot Camp assistant’s prompts and read through the Boot Camp instructions. I immediately hit a problem: I needed a Windows install disk that had Service Pack 2 (SP2) already included, and fully integrated, into the build; my Windows install disks were only SP1. I could not continue with my Boot Camp install. Boo!

This problem really annoyed me. I was so close, I thought I was home and dry only to discover this show-stopper. I’m not one to give in easily so decided to see if I could find either a way around it or maybe rebuild my install image to include SP2.

After a couple of searches using the all-knowing Google and after a few frustrating dead ends I found this really useful document from helpwithwindows.com: Slipstreaming Windows XP to SP2. It details a process called “slipstreaming”, something that I’d never heard of before. You need a PC running windows to achieve it but as I had my old PC that wasn’t going to be a problem.

Follow the instructions in the slipstreaming document (above), to summarise the process: on a PC first copy your Windows install disk image to a new directory on your hard drive, then download SP2, then issue a command from the windows command line to integrate SP2 into the original install Windows disk effectively upgrading it to SP2. Finally, burn the image back to CD observing a few special settings relating to the burn process. Read the rest of this entry »