I recently Switched back to MacOS and one the unforeseen (Well, almost, it just turned out much better than I anticipated!) consequence is Parallels Desktop. In case you were wondering, the other one is TextMate]. Parallels is one of the first applications I installed after unpacking my new iMac.

Installing Windows was surprisingly easy, and is probably easier than to install BootCamp, repartition, and then having to reboot to switch back and forth between MacOS and Windows.

Here’s what I did.

### Installing Parallels
Just download Parallels Desktop, get a trial key, or better yet, just buy it and run the installer.

### Installing Windows XP
Not much here. Create a “New Window…”, choose “Typical Settings”, then select “Windows” as the Guest OS Type, “Windows XP” as the Guest OS Version, and hit “Finish”. Then just put in a windows CD (I used a WinXP SP1 CD), boot up the Windows VM and voila! The installer starts up, and from there, it’s just like installing windows, except that here, it finds all the drivers. Once Windows is installed, I went through the __Windows Update__ ritual of update, reboot, update, reboot, update, reboot… It will end at some point, I promise!
You can now set the Windows resolution to what you want.
Hint: use option-return to switch to full screen mode.

### Installing the Parallels Tools
As if this wasn’t good enough, when running windows, you can install the Parallels Tools to get transparent mouse switching between the 2 environments, as well as sharing of your mac disk with the windows environment. To install, while windows is active, just Run the “Install Parallels Tools” from the VM menu. This will trigger the installer in the windows environment, and once the installer completes, you no longer need to click to switch the mouse cursor to sync the mouse with windows. It is now all automatic as soon as you hover over the windows window.

Pretty neat, no?

### Installing PDTweaker
One more step to have the perfect setup. As it appears that too much caching is not necessarily the best thing in the world, and in some cases, no caching is best, you should install [PDTweaker](http://www.multisolar.com/software/PDTweaker/) which will remedy this. Suprisingly, this was the tricky bit of the whole thing because it requires that you install [Application Enhancer 2.0](http://unsanity.com/haxies/ape/) firts, and once I installed it, it would still not recognize the .ape package. Fortunately, the solution was right on the main PDTeaker Page. I was able to install PDTweaker by going to the System Preferences, selecting the Application Enhancer Panel (under Other), and then click on the ‘+’ to add PDTWeaker.

That’s it!

Next step: install Ubuntu.