So I've been running exclusively on the Mac Pro for a month now. My old PC is sitting beside me collecting dust. Windows 2000 is running very well within the Parallels virtual machine and MacOS X 10.4 "Tiger" runs beautifully on a quad-core Intel system with 3GB of memory. I pretty much have Windows running all the time for a couple of programs and do most of my work in OSX (including my web browsing, email, updating this website, watching videos and DVDs, listening to music and podcasts in iTunes, editing and converting videos. However there is this one video player for Windows which simply has no equal anywhere -- it's called Media Player Classic. It's free and plays any file format supported by Microsoft's own Media Player with the exception of DRM protected content (of which I have none anyway). I am here to say that video playback within the Parallels virtual machine is as smooth as it ever was on my real PC! Sound stays in sync, there is no stuttering even with HD content and CPU usage is still low enough that none of what I'm doing within OSX is noticeably affected.
How am I liking the Mac Pro in general? For one thing it's amazingly quiet for a system with four processors and two hard drives. My old single processor PC with just one hard drive was louder. With all four cores going there is never a slowdown on the system. Converting video from the rather useless WMV format (even MS's own player is not able to seek and scan within this MS designed format) into something useful like standard MPEG-4 makes use of all four processor cores at once and yet I am still able to browse the web in Firefox while listening to a podcast in iTunes and chatting with friends in iChat -- and yes, Windows 2000 is still running one or two programs in the background while this is going on. I can contrast this directly with my PC at work which is a dual-core system running Windows XP. Just launching MS Outlook 2003 causes the whole system to become unresponsive for about thirty seconds.
It's fair to say that I am extremely happy with my Mac Pro purchase.
Parallels Desktop for Mac installed without a problem a couple of days ago. On a friend's recommendation I downloaded the installer (trial version) from the Parallel's website and used my retail product key to activate that -- the trial is the full version but time-limited until you enter the key. As Parallels seems to be updated fairly regularly this ensured that I had the most up-to-date version upon install.
In anticipation of this event I had already built a fully patched and updated Windows 2000 Professional install CD using the slipstream method to add recent patches and updates. I had them installed it into the Windows version of Parallels as a trial before my copy of the Mac version arrived. I simply copied the virtual machine files from the Windows host system over to the Mac host system and it started right up. The only hitch here was that apparently the Windows and Mac hosted versions use different device drivers within the virtual machine, but the correct drivers were installed automatically by Windows and after one reboot all I need then to do was go to the menu bar and click to install the Parallels Tools (a set of utilities which help to integrate the guest and host operating systems a little).
Understand that I am not a big gamer. Most of what I'll need Windows in Parallels for is to keep doing business as usual while I find Macintosh software to replace each thing I've been doing in Windows. Some of that has already been moved over to wholly to the Mac (music in iTunes, instant messaging in iChat, video editing in iMovie and documents and spreadsheets in NeoOffice). For my uses, the performance of the guest Windows 2000 running under MacOS X 10.4.9 is quite good. Windows boots up very quickly (even faster than on my real 2GHz PC though that may be a product of not having as much history/cruft of installed software to work through during startup).
What I found really interesting, though, is that when I fired up my favorite newsgroup reader (XNews) under Parallels on the Mac, I got download speeds of 2 to 2.5 times what I get on my real Windows PC! On the PC my best download speed in a newsgroup has been around 130KB/s but under Parallels Desktop for Mac my download speed hit 300KB/s. Further the CPU usage of the virtual machine is pretty low when you're not doing anything particularly taxing such as playing video or calculating Pi to the three millionth digit. With XNews running in the guest OS I turned off two of my Mac Pro's processor cores (it is a quad core machine) and did not notice any performance penalty in either the guest or the host system.
Parallels also just announced that the next version (due out by the end of this month, I believe) will feature further optional integration between the guest and host systems and 3D graphics acceleration which should make gaming within the virtual machine much better.
The reason I bought an Intel-powered Mac was so that I could eliminate my PC. For years I have been running with one PC and one Mac on my desktop. I finally got so tired of all the cables and wires on and behind my desk, not to mention the power requirements of two full-fledged systems, that I went and bought a Mac that can act as both. Having four processor cores will surely help in this area, allowing the PC stuff (eComStation and Windows) to run at full speed without affecting performance on the Mac side. To do this I purchased a product called Parallels Desktop for Mac.
Parallels has been making software emulators/virtualization tools for years. I"m relatively certain they were one of the few companies some years back who provided an OS/2-hosted PC emulator (VirtualPC came along shortly after but was soon purchased by Microsoft and, shock of shocks, the OS/2 version was immediately cancelled). Now with Parallels Desktop running on Intel-based Macintosh computers a user can run the current best operating system (MacOS X) and within windows be running Linux, OS/2, eComStation, DOS or Windows.
When my boxed copy arrived the first thing I noticed was that it was rather heavy; surprisingly so. I've gotten so used to big software boxes with nothing inside but a CD and a six or eight page booklet containing mostly warranty information and a brief quick-start guide. Parallels Desktop for Mac came with a complete printed users manual of around 240 pages. A lot of this is due to duplication of information relating to the various operating systems supported within Parallels Desktop. For instance, it tells you how to install the Parallels Tools (a set of drivers and utilities which make the host and guest OS communicate better with one another for a more seamless experience) into Windows 95/98/ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, eComStation and Linux. If not for the multitude of supported guest operating systems, the manual could be half as thick or less. But either way, the book is a valuable resource with clear text and images to guide you through most functions. This is not a shoddy photocopy like some so-called users manuals these days; it's an actual printed, soft cover book.
I haven't gotten around to actually using Parallels Desktop just yet, as I am waiting on extra memory to arrive so I can give my guest OS more than the minimum required amount of RAM, but in preparation I have installed the free trail of Parallels Workstation on my Windows 2000 machine and created a freshly installed and configured system I can transfer onto my Mac (as a single file) which I can then use withing Parallels Desktop for Mac. The so-called virtual machine files are supposed to be interchangable between the two systems and the OS inside the virtual machine will never know the difference.
The Apple Mac Pro is a super computer in a desktop tower case. It's far more powerful than I really needed or wanted right now, but I plan to be using this thing for another four to five years, by which point the then-current software will be so demanding that the Mac Pro will actually be seen as slow.
I had intended to buy a mid-range Mac computer however I have always been squeamish about systems with integrated displays; if the display goes bad the computer becomes useless and vice versa. Apple is really lacking a good mid-range, display-less desktop in their 2006-2007 product line. The Mac Mini has neither enough power nor enough expansion and the Mac Pro is overkill for almost any home user. Still, better to have too much and grow into it than to have too little and feel the need to replace it in a year.
So my Mac Pro arrived this week. I bought a refurbished model direct from Apple. Their refurbished machines carry the full standard one year warranty and the option to add another two years of AppleCare coverage just like their new machines. As far as I can tell, any problems the previous owner had with this machine have been fixed -- either that or there never were any problems and the previous owner just felt they couldn't afford it after all and returned it for a refund. The machine is in superb physical condition and runs like a champ with MacOS X 10.4 "Tiger". I got the 2.66GHz version which has two dual-core processors for a total of four processor cores. For those who may not understand, software which is properly written to use more than one processor can literally do more things at one time or split up the workload to complete one major task more quickly when given two, four or eight cores. I believe that right now all of Apple's current Mac products have at least two cores and they've just released the first 8-core Mac Pro, which I guess makes mine a upper-mid-range system now.
The unit shipped from Apple with 1GB of memory, a 250GB hard drive and GeForce 7300GT graphics card. In theory this card can be replaced with a better card in the future. As of this writing there is only one after-market card available (direct from Apple) but it costs $400 and gets pretty terrible reviews from customers for burning itself up due to an apparently bad fan design which doesn't keep the card cool enough. My hope is that in a year or two some third party will provide a good mid-range video card for the MacPro which, though it won't be the fastest for its time, will be inexpensive enough for me and more powerful than what I have now. The Mac Pro has three empty hard drive bays so there is room for expansion, though if you've read my Infrant ReadyNAS review you know that I now have my storage needs wrapped up nicely in a small external unit available to all the computers on my home network. The previous generation PowerMac G5 had only two hard drive bays and one optical drive bay where the Mac Pro has two of those.
As with probably any prebuilt PC, my Mac Pro came with the operating system already installed. I just had to start it up, enter a few screens of information to create my personal login account, setup my preferred language and decline the offers to pay Apple another $99 for an email and online (read as slow) disk storage service called .Mac. Now the unit which I got shipped with MacOS X 10.4.7 which is a 2006 vintage. The current release is 10.4.9 so there was a bit of updating to be done. Never fear, though, as MacOS X has a very easy software updates tool similar but even easier to use then Microsoft's Windows Update. The key difference is that Apple's Software Update is an application running on your Mac which goes out and grabs the updates you need whereas Windows Update (except when you have it set to automatically download and install updates) requires you to visit a website and wait while the system installs a web browser extension which then checks to see what updates you need. Apple's solution is faster and doesn't require the user to initiate the process; only to click whether they want to install the updates now or later.
Now I have a good three years experience with MacOS X (prior to their switch to using Intel processors) and the operating system works exactly the same now as it did when I last used it in December when I sold my PowerMac G5 in anticipation of purchasing an Intel-powered model. I was up and running with the system fully updated and patched within an hour or so and then began the process of customizing settings to my liking and installing some third-party software I will be using.
But as a preliminary test I opened Apple's own iMovie which came free with the Mac (and with all new Macs in fact) and dragged in some video files to be joined together and exported as a single file in a different format. I had done this (with differing versions of iMovie) on my original PowerMac G4, the G5 and now this Mac Pro and I have to say that each generation definitely got faster. All four or my processor cores were in use but none of them topped out at the 100% mark, which means my system was still able to do other things like launch iTunes, transfer files to and from my NAS (network attached storage) device and continue installing software. The old G4 had been good with iMovie and as it was a dual processor machine it had remained fairly responsive, but the G5 still got the job done sooner and the Mac Pro finished in record time. I even used the demanding h264 video codec which is well-known for high qaulity output but puts a lot of stress on the processor(s).
Next up: Parallels Desktop For Mac
©1996, 2008 by Don K. Eitner