Parallels users have been offered the ability to question Ben Rudolph, the leader of Parallel's marketing and business development programs.  In this continuing coverage of "Ask Ben Anything", Ben answers new questions posed to him on his Blog, the Official Parallels Virtualization Blog.

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Will Parallels play nice with the new Core 2 Duo MacBook Pros?

- David P.

Absolutely. We released a build a few weeks ago that works seamlessly with the new Mac Pro towers and new Core 2 Duo-powered Macs. The code that makes that work is now a standard part of Parallels Desktop, so you won't have any problems installing it on a new MacBook Pro, if you're lucky enough to have one!


Parallels Tools rocks in Windows XP. But, I notice that only a few tools work when I install the package in Vista. What's the deal with that?

- Jen F.

Since Vista support is still experimental (and Microsoft keeps changing the builds on us) we don't yet have a full Tools package. When Vista goes live with a final version, we'll have a complete tools package that works just like it does in XP.


How many virtual machines can you run at one time?

- Paul N.

For both Parallels Workstation and Parallels Desktop, the short answer is "as many as your machine can handle". On a solid mid-level PC or Mac with 1GB of RAM, you should be able to run 2-3 virtual machine comfortably. Of course, the more RAM and faster processor you have, the more VMs you can run simultaneously. I've run 4 at once (XP, Vista, Fedora 5, OS/2) on my 1.83GHz, 2GB RAM MacBookPro, and I've seen as many as 9 run full-speed simultaneously on a maxed-out Mac Pro (quad processor 3 Ghz Xeon, 16GB of RAM).

Check out Ben's Blog site, here.