Behaviour on new Max Book Pro / Retina

Hi,

I intend to purchase a new Macbook Pro Retina by some weeks. I'd like to know what I can expect from PD7:
- support for Moutain Lion? (I know they are with Lion at start, but plan to upgrade asap)
- support for built-in USB 3 ports?
- support for Ethernet through Thunderbolt port?

Thanks in advance
Armel

 

I can tell you right now, thunderbolt display ethernet, etc works great. I haven't gotten my retina macbook pro yet, but once I do, I'll post my experience here.

Haven't tried USB 3.0 but I do not think it would carry the device over. Will try and let you know though.

 

Hi,
well, we're testing new MacBook in our lab now, but we already have an update for Retina displays: http://kb.parallels.com/en/114120

Regards,
Hanna

 

Can you let us know what the update actually does, in terms of support?
It would also be interesting to know how Parallels sees itself taking advantage (or not) of the Retina display.

 

I'm most interested to learn what the optimal settings are between the OS X display settings and the Win 7 DPI settings. I've got OS X set to the "most text" setting, and Windows at 125%, and it still seems a little soft.

 

Finally got my rMBP. Love it! Parallels just does doubling of the windows interface so everything looks just a tad blurry. Very usable still as the pixels are just doubled. I think the update just makes the normal interface elements look good (they look retina), but windows itself is just doubled in pixels. Ideally would be nice if it had an option use retina in windows or not. And if it needs to be used, you'd have to do the Windows DPI thing at like 150-200%

 

Hi, Can you confirm that Ethernet in a 27" Thunderbolt display works with windows XP.

Thanks

 

thanks, i look forward your response on USB 3 (I have a NTFS disk i'd like to use for windows in PD7, and if i cannot connect, upgrading the MBP will be of no use).

 

parallels runs flawlessly on my retina display macbook pro so far BUT i did try 2 different usb 3.0 flash drives and a usb 3.0 external hard drive and windows did not recognize them. it just says unknown device. unplugging and connecting them to mac os x works fine though

 

Yes, ethernet on thunderbolt works perfect in parallels. Works as both bridged or shared.

 

One weird issue I'm having, and I've never had the problem before are kernel panics when running more than 1 vm at a time. It's very random and rare, so have no idea what causes it.

 

Issues with NTFS partitions and USB 3

I don't have a retina display but I do have issues with the USB3 and the frequent panics (which I didn't have with the former model) so I post just in case it helps:

1) USB3 drives are not recognized under Parallels. For Pankey, the workaround to use smartmount works, but it means they appear as network drives, it would be nice to have them as native drives.

2) I have tried to use the custom folders to mount my two NTFS partitions on my second internal drive, and that works well except that I can't write to them from the VM (a standalone Win7 ultimate x64 VM, not from Bootcamp). It says I don't have the right priviledges, but read/write is selected for both shares in the custom folders options. I thought I had solved the issue when I installed Parangon NTFS, but I get very frequent panic crashes when I work in a VM or close it (even a single VM), and I suspect it is the cause. If I disable Parangon it looks like the crashes go away.

AlekseyM, do you use Parangon NTFS? There might be an incompatibility with Lion or the new Macbooks which causes the frequent crashes?

 

@Manni01: I have also Paragon and it crashes as well on a Firewire disk accessed from PD7 on my MBP with Leopard. I contacted them twice, they admit the problem with a "we don't expect to fix" response... hence my wanting of a direct access to USB3 from PD.

 

As I said above, you can't mount (yet) USB3 drives in a VM, but if you activate the Smartmount option in the sharing preferences, the Mac will mount the drives and the VM will automatically add them as network shares (so you can read/write to them). There might be a small performance hit, but it's a good workaround until we get native USB3 support in the VM.

 

@Manni01: I need NTFS write support (with compressed files) and Paragon crashes every now and then when accessed from PD7.

 

I had to do a fresh install of OS10 Lion to get rid of the parallels related panic crashes with Paragon. I had upgraded from Snow Leopard and had permissions which could not get corrected on the system partition. I suggest you check your permissions, try to correct them, if you can't (verify after correction, mine were not corrected) there is a hidden option in the recovery partition to correct them while the OS is not active (see http://osxdaily.com/2011/11/15/repair-user-permissions-in-mac-os-x-lion/).

If that doesn't work, try to backup your user files and do a fresh install of Lion. I had to correct a few parallels files after the OSX Lion upgrade and it seems it doesn't really like not starting from a fresh system.

Another thing I discovered is that if you want, like me, to mount NTFS partitions in a second internal HD in optical bay as data drives for bootcamp, you can do so by adding the hard drive in the VM configuration as a bootcamp type. Select the physical drive, check the partition(s) you want to mount, and the drive will be mounted natively in the VM. Parallels can then read/write to it without Paragon being enabled.

So I now disable Paragon except when I need to use it momentarily (ie to format NTFS partitions using Disk Utilities). Both bootcamp (native and VM) can access my NTFS partitions doing this. Not tested with compressed files, but I don't see why it shouldn't work.

Mac much more stable since fresh install, so I highly recommend it.

I have also moved my user files to a second hard drive so that OS and Data 0 including dropbox - are separated (that's something I've always done with windows). That way, in case of a problem, you just restore the OS partition and your data is up to date even if you don't have a recent backup. See here http://martinbay.net/how-to-move-user-folder/ on how to do this.

I now have OSX and Bootcamp on my first internal HD, and an NTFS data partition for bootcamp, an HFS data partition for OSX and an exFAT partition for Media files which can be read/written natively from either OS on a second internal hard drive.

 

I am not using Paragon but still get the kernel panics. I realized you don't need to be running 2 vms at once. Just one VM will cause them. Not sure why, or what causes them. Will try switching from dual-processor assigned to the vm to just a single one incase that helps somehow.