After a frustrating and unsatisfactorary experience with VMWare, I have concluded that my plan to use that to run linux on top of windows will not work. Given that I really can’t justify a >$1K laptop purchase right now, my options are few.

With all the hype about OSX users using Parallels Virtualization lately, I thought I’d see if something similar exists for the Windows world. Much to my surprise it turns out that yes indeed something does exist, and it’s actually Parallels itself. So I gave it a spin and I must say I do know what all the hype is about. This thing flies — compared to the slowpokey and annoying VMWare my experience has been quite pleasant.

But still not great. Two minor yet glaring flaws would prevent me from using this to replace a proper installation. For one, it doesn’t support xv video which means that watching movies looks ugly and is very slow and goes out of sync. But worse than that, the Windows version doesn’t have the ability to support widescreen laptops like mine so the screen is all stretched and ugly. Oh well. Better, but not good enough.