Fast OS Switching With Parallels and Virtue
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I have written before about using Parallels on my MacBookPro to run Windows XP. Installing Parallels Tools made the experience even better, allowing movement between the two operating systems almost seemlessly. The one thing I have been missing is a way to run XP full screen and easily move back and forth between OS X and XP.
The forthcoming “Spaces” feature that will be part of Leopard looks promising, but I need something now, not in the Spring of 2007. So, I installed VirtueDesktops, which creates virtual desktops, allowing you to open groups of applications on seperate desktops. In a sense, it is very similar to what Spaces will be, sans the ability to drag applications from one desktop to another.
So, what I do now is switch to one of my desktops and fireup Parallels and Windows XP. Once I login, I push it to fullscreen. I can then use my Virtue trigger keys to fast-switch between XP and OS X. This makes it a whole lot easier to move between operating systems without having to exit the fullscreen mode of Parallels then minimizing it to get to my OS X desktop.





October 22nd, 2006
One of the cool things they did was allow you to run Parallels full-screen on one monitor and Mac OS on the other. That’s generally how I run it on my desktop machine. It’s like having two computers running at the same time.
October 23rd, 2006
I can’t seem to come up with a set of trigger keys that will work from inside my maximized “parallels” desktop — what are you using?
October 23rd, 2006
I am just using the default trigger keys that are set when you install Virtue. Its shift + control + left arrow/right arrow.
October 26th, 2006
Yeah, I’ve been loving XP/Vista/Fedora/Ubuntu/Suse/Debian on my MBP with Parallels! You definitely want to max out the RAM though…
January 20th, 2007
To make virtue desktop or for that any other hotkey work under full screen in parallels, just press ctrl+alt to release the mouse and keyboard from the os you’re running and than press the wanted key combo…