That made the preview a non-starter for a lot of modern productivity software for Windows, which had long assumed that current PCs used 64-bit processors and the corresponding version of Windows. After installing the preview of the ARM64 Windows 10, you could run 32-bit Intel and ARM apps 64-bit ARM apps but not 64-bit Intel apps. When the preview version of what became Parallels 17 was released last spring, it brought both promise and frustration.

I tried to get id Software’s “Doom Eternal” to run on both Intel and M1 systems, and it crashed on startup both times. You’re better off with 2D games, and many games that require additional graphics software just won’t run. Microsoft has suspended that for now, but Parallels includes a virtual TPM 2.0 chip if necessary.Īnd while no serious gamer is going to consider using Parallels to run state-of-the-art titles, this version does include an improved graphics driver and better performance for Microsoft’s DirectX. It runs the Windows 11 Preview just as well as Windows 10, and those who set up that virtual machine won’t have to worry about the need for a TPM 2.0 chip that was originally part of the requirements. The Intel version can run literally dozens of different virtual machines – 10 versions of Windows and Windows Server, as well as Boot Camp 11 versions of macOS, including the upcoming macOS 12 Montery and eight distros of Linux officially, though a Parallels spokesperson told me that it will run four more unofficially. Even Windows 10 and 11 Preview boot times are snappy, certainly faster than booting up a real Windows PC.

From a cold start, in which the app must launch as well as the virtual machine, it’s about double that to resume, but that’s still pretty impressive. On my Intel iMac, Parallels 17 gets very close to instantaneous suspend and resume times, with three seconds to suspend and just two seconds to resume, when Parallels is running. It works so well, you can even suspend the guest operating system while it’s doing something as critical as applying a software update without doing harm. When they need to work on it again, they just resume it, and the virtual machine wakes up in the same state as before. This takes the current state of the machine running in the host Mac’s memory and saves it to disk (or an SSD).

One of the things many Parallel users do frequently is suspend a virtual machine, rather than shutting it down, when they are no longer using it. That’s true on the Intel side for Parallels 17, though I’d have to say that version 16 was pretty damned zippy. With each annual release, Parallels is touted as being faster than the previous year’s version.

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