We can argue until we're blue in the face that the Mac does things better, or that you can achieve the same things under Mac OS X as under Windows, just in a slightly different way, but the reality is that the ability to run Windows is sufficiently desirable, and many Mac users have a cheap Dell box lurking under a table somewhere.

That all changed in January 2006 with the introduction of Intel-powered Macs. This move meant that, at a hardware level, Macs were essentially identical to other PCs in the market, and it prompted Apple to develop its Boot Camp system that allowed you to partition off a chunk of your Mac's hard disk, onto which you could install Windows.

One computer could now run both systems, though you had to shut down the Mac side completely to reboot into Windows, and vice versa.

Parallels changed that, too. Now, once you'd bought a copy of Windows, you could run it alongside Mac OS X, in a window that behaved no differently to any other window in OS X.

Switching between the two involved sweeping your mouse from one window to another, and because Parallels Desktop is a virtualised system, rather than an emulated one - it's able to directly access the Mac's processor, rather than having its instructions translated from one architecture to another, as with Virtual PC - there was very little performance hit.

New features

Parallels Desktop 3.0 is the new release of the virtualisation system, and it adds three major new features. The most exciting is support for 3D, though that should read 'some support for 3D'. It brings DirectX 8.1 to its virtual PCs to give some support for 3D gaming and CAD applications.

Performance is reasonable, particularly if you cut the company slack for achieving so much in a '1.0' release of this technology, but there's a long way to go.

The existing implementation needs tuning, as even with some older games, settings must be turned down if frame rates and audio sync are to be maintained, and there are hardware limitations; while processor virtualisation is made possible at the hardware level with Intel VT-x, graphics hardware is still, in effect, emulated.