A Couple of Upgrades

Today I performed a couple of upgrades on Rohan, my MacBook Pro.

The first was to download and install the latest production build of Parallels Desktop. Coherence is now out of beta. I'd wanted to try it but not while it was still a release candidate. Anyway, this makes Parallels even more impressive than before. Running Windows in Coherence mode makes it look like the Taskbar and the rest of your apps are just overlaid on top of your OS X desktop. In a sense, it's similar to having the video output of remotely-running X11 applications display on your local desktop, although the icons of running Windows apps will appear in the OS X Dock.

The second upgrade was to add another 1 GB of RAM, bringing system memory to 2 gigs. OS X runs fine in 1 GB but when running Parallels, I wanted to be able to allocate at least 512 MB of RAM to XP. XP in Parallels runs much better with 512 MB than 256 MB, as I'd had it before. Much, much snappier.

I'd ordered a 2 GB upgrade kit from Crucial. Thinking that I'd have to yank 1 GB in a pair of 512 MB SODIMMs, I was surprised to find that Rohan actually shipped with a single 1 GB SODIMM of Samsung RAM from the factory, with one slot free. Doh! I will try it for a couple of days with the OEM RAM and one of the two Crucial SODIMMs, to ensure there aren't any incompatibilities. Assuming there aren't I'll return the extra SODIMM.