You know a company has had an influence on Apple when Apple start selling their product through the website. Parallels is one such product, and they announced yesterday that Parallels Desktop Hits Apple Store.

Parallels has been hitting Apple's Boot Camp on the nose as a solution for those people who need or want to run an alternative OS on their Intel based Apple Macs. They both have benefits and opposing pitfalls. Boot Camp provides compatibility and performance but requires a reboot between switches. Parallels enables you to run both simultaneously, and the performance is great for everything but graphics-intensive environments.

You know a company has had an influence on Apple when Apple start selling their product through the website. Parallels is one such product, and they announced yesterday that Parallels Desktop Hits Apple Store.

Parallels has been hitting Apple's Boot Camp on the nose as a solution for those people that need or want to run alternative OS on their Intel based Apple Macs. They both have benefits and opposing pitfalls; Boot Camp provides compatibility and performance but requires a reboot between switches. Parallels enables you to run both simultaneously, and the performance is great for everything but graphics-intensive environments.

I visited a friend last week who owns a small business. His computers are managed by a local consulting firm, but he was beginning to suspect that their advice was less than stunning, and so asked my opinion.

A quick look at the computers showed a few interesting snippets. There weren't any fundamental issues, but it was clear that for all the 'service' they were getting, nobody, either at the business, or the consulting firm, were doing any kind of maintenance on the machines, only fixing them when they went wrong. This was true, even though the company in question charged both a monthly fee (retainer) in addition to an hourly fee went someone was called out.

I visited a friend last week who owns a small business. His computers are managed by a local consulting firm, but he was beginning to suspect that their advice was less than stunning, and so asked my opinion.

A quick look at the computers showed a few interesting snippets. There weren't any fundamental issues, but it was clear that for all the 'service' they were getting, nobody, either at the business, or the consulting firm, were doing any kind of maintenance on the machines, only fixing them when they went wrong. This was true, even though the company in question charged both a monthly fee (retainer) in addition to an hourly fee went someone was called out.

Dual Core is a hot topic at the moment, and from personal experience (my iMac Core Duo, and a MacBook Pro currently on its way) it works very well. It is not so much the power of the CPU as the difference it gives in responsiveness - I don't get any of the freezes or pauses that I used to get when using my iMac Intel Core Duo.

I'm no stranger to multi-CPU systems, my first home PC (as opposed to the work units I'd been provided with) was a dual CPU unit. And of course my Niagara cased T1000 and T2000 units take the multi-core model to the extreme.

With the advent of dual-core, you have to wonder whether there is a difference between dual-core and dual-CPU. Is one faster than the other? Dual-CPU theoretically have more bandwidth available to each CPU, but the dual-core model allows information to be shared more effectively between the two cores because there is less distance between the two cores.

Dual Core is a hot topic at the moment, and from personal experience (my iMac Core Duo, and a MacBook Pro currently on its way) it works very well. It is not so much the power of the CPU as the difference it gives in responsiveness - I don't get any of the freezes or pauses that I used to get when using my iMac Intel Core Duo.

I'm no stranger to multi-CPU systems, my first home PC (as opposed to the work units I'd been provided with) was a dual CPU unit. And of course my Niagara cased T1000 and T2000 units take the multi-core model to the extreme.

With the advent of dual-core, you have to wonder whether there is a difference between dual-core and dual-CPU. Is one faster than the other? Dual-CPU theoretically have more bandwidth available to each CPU, but the dual-core model allows information to be shared more effectively between the two cores because there is less distance between the two cores.

As expected, VMware has decided to make VMware Server free to use. VMware Server is a nice product that has some great methods for creating, managing and deploying virtual machines. It is a great product for consolidation and testing.

At the same time, Microsoft has made VirtualPC free. This is the desktop product rather than the server product, Windows Virtual Server 2005, which is already free.