Last week when Parallels released the latest beta update (it’s actually a release candidate) to Parallels Desktop, they added a few new features, but the one that interested me most was the addition of experimental support for Microsoft Windows Vista—the next version of Windows due in January (supposedly).

I had downloaded the public beta of Vista (beta 2) back in August in order to do some testing with IE 7, but couldn’t install it because Parallels didn’t support it at the time, so I was looking forward to giving it a try with the new update and finally got a chance to this weekend.

Installation was pretty straight-forward and went a lot faster than I expected—even when installing from DVD instead of a mounted disk image. Once installed and booted up, I followed the instructions in this post in the Parallels forums to install the Parallels Tools and managed to get everything working properly (video, network, mouse, etc.).

Here’s a screenshot (FYI: the full-size one is pretty big):

Parallels running Windows Vista

I haven’t had much of a chance to really play around with it yet, but I did notice a few things:

1. You get prompted for confirmation for pretty much everything you do and it’s annoying as hell.
2. This site displays properly in IE 7 (yay!) :-)

Another thing of note is that it doesn’t work with Vista RC 1 (yet), but that’s likely because RC1 was released the same day (or possibly the day after) the latest Parallels Desktop update. I’d be surprised if they didn’t add support for RC 1 in the next version of the update.