While I have worked on both Macs and PCs for years, I prefer the Mac for home. Because I write macros for excel as a side business, it’s important that I write my code in a native PC environment. To do this, I used to use Boot Camp on my Mac. But with my latest MBP upgrade I decided to give Parallels a try. I’m very glad I did! Setting up parallels, and installing windows was a breeze…took about 30 mins once I located my Windows 10 authentication keys. Much simpler and much faster than creating a PC boot volume using Boot Camp. I really like being able to fire up my PC environment as quickly as launching any application and keeping it open in its own window while my Mac environment is still running side by side. I have found zero inconsistencies or problems using Parallels. I was really expecting some finer point issues such as networking or printing. But so far it has been a perfectly seamless PC experience. The copy and paste between PC and Mac environments is also a great advantage. Overall, I’m very happy to pay Parallels’ reasonable annual license fee (boot camp is free) for quality software that just works with no hassle and that’s maintained with regular updates. One feature that took me a bit to work through (actually called customer support to get clarification) was how the PC and Mac “hard drives” interact. Parallels defaulted to a highly integrated hard drive configuration between PC and Mac, which I didn’t care for. I found it confusing keeping straight which files were from my PC World vice my Mac World. With some help, I now have things configured where my Mac/iCloud world is separate from my PC/OneDrive world…and that’s how I like it. It’s easy enough to move files across the boundary when needed but nothing happens automatically. I’m impressed that Parallels allowed me to set things up just the way I work. Excellent piece of software! Highly recommend for any Mac user that needs a fully compatible, native PC but doesn’t want to buy PC hardware.
