Unfortunately, there’s no visual indication of what happens if you then click the mouse, so you’ll need to remember which corner you’ve assigned to which task. Once you’ve set a behavior for a corner, moving the mouse into that corner will “peel down” and reveal a bit of your OS X desktop. Pull-down corners ease working in full-screen modeTo make working in full-screen mode easier, Parallels 5 lets you specify behaviors for mousing into the four screen corners-you can switch to one of the other available view modes, or show the Parallels menu bar. In Linux, however, the third screen was seen by the system (the horizontal resolution reflected its existence), but it was all white, and I couldn’t see anything that I dragged onto that screen. Adding a third screen to the mix worked perfectly in Windows. Like Fusion 3, Parallels 5 offers improved multi-monitor support, treating two displays as separate monitors in Windows, and as one large gargantuan display in Linux. (This may not be an issue with all games, but it was in the two I tested with.) As a user, you’ll have to decide whether the faster suspend times in general are worth this tradeoff when trying to suspend an in-progress 3D game. In Fusion, the same experiment worked just fine-so one tradeoff of the faster sleep time in Parallels is, at least in my testing, an inability to sleep and then resume a 3D game. When I tried sleeping the machine while a 3D game was running, it worked, but the game didn’t work after waking from sleep. There’s a small caveat there, at least with suspending. Suspending, waking, booting, and shutting down were all quickest in Parallels, too. I found the Aero effects worked very smoothly in Windows 7 on my Mac Pro. Parallels is alone in its support for OpenGL 2.1 in Linux and Windows 7. More usefully, you’ll also be able to run Linux programs that require OpenGL acceleration. In addition, OpenGL acceleration is included in Linux guests, enabling full visual effects (such as windows that deform when dragged) in Linux systems such as Ubuntu 9.10. Like Fusion 3, Parallels 5 now supports Windows Aero in Windows 7, and also includes OpenGL 2.1 acceleration in both XP Pro and Windows 7 (Fusion only supports OpenGL 2.1 in Windows XP Pro). For someone expecting a standard Windows interface after installation, this can be disconcerting. Parallels also defaults to booting Windows virtual machines in the fully-integrated Coherence mode, where the Windows desktop vanishes, and Windows’ windows are intermingled with those of OS X. As someone who has personally experienced Windows malware infections, total integration is not something I recommend for most virtual machine users, and yet it’s the default behavior in Parallels. More troubling is that, when creating a new Windows virtual machine, the default settings are for full integration of the Mac OS and the Windows guest-the default even sets the Windows’ user folder to the Mac’s Users folder. There’s no way to avoid this, so if you find the aliases useless (as I do), you have to manually remove them each time you create a virtual machine. First, every time you create a new virtual machine, Parallels creates an alias to that virtual machine on your OS X Desktop. There are a couple aspects of installing guest OSes that could be improved.
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