I know, I’m a couple of weeks late to the party. Last night I finally had a chance to clone my Parallels folder to an external drive off my MacBook Pro and install the 3036 beta. Of course, because I backed it up first the update went off without a hitch. Seems most of the problems that people are reporting are due to the integration with Boot Camp, which I don’t use.

Lots has been said about the new beta…here’s what I appreciate:

Keyboard mapping! Command-C on the Mac side to grab text, Command-V on the PC to paste and visa versa. At last. Now I only wish it worked for Command-N and Command-S, too. Erik pointed me to DoubleCommand. Maybe this weekend I’ll try it.

Resizable window. The VM window can now be resized on the fly. No more going to into the XP Displays control panel to get a bigger (or smaller view). I tried Coherence, the feature that allows VM application windows to float separately among the OS X ones. Eh. I have my XP window sized as large as it can go on my MacBookPro Display and the menu bar, dock, icons and everything else are on the 23″ Display. I’m used to it, and for now I prefer working this way.

Drag & Drop files. This is the killer one for me. I had a “Temp Stuff” folder in my shared folder before. Those were for those files that I needed to open on the other platform but not necessarily keep forever. Essentially, it’s how I use my desktop…stuff that I deal with and either trash or file. With Drag & Drop between XP and OS X, I no longer need that folder. I can just drag files from one desktop to the other when and if I need to and it’s not limited to the items in the shared folder. Sweet!!

Better performance. I may be imagining it, but it doesn’t feel like Parallels 3036 is demanding as much CPU as the previous version did. Maybe it’s Saturday and I’m not asking as much.