Macworld: Running Vista Home on a Mac

Parallels Desktop
Macworld has a hands on with Microsoft Windows Vista Home, loading it up under Parallels Desktop and Apple’s Boot Camp. They were able to install it under Parallels.

Excerpt:

If you care about running Windows on a Mac, you’ve undoubtedly heard that the end user license agreement (EULA) for Windows Vista Home Basic and Home Premium forbids you to use these versions of Microsoft’s latest operating system release with virtualization software—software that allows you to run operating systems other than the Mac OS in a windowed environment within the Mac OS. Such virtualization software includes the popular Parallels Desktop for Mac. What the reports on this matter don’t reveal is whether this is simply a legal restriction or also a technical one….
Cutting briefly to the chase, Vista Home Premium installed perfectly well. Once it was up and running I noticed that the Aero effect was nowhere to be seen—Parallels simply couldn’t emulate the kind of graphic card/power necessary to make it work. I then asked Vista to install the latest Vista updates—something I understood to be a problem for others who tried it.

Vista Home Premium running on a Mac via the latest Parallels Desktop beta

No problem. Vista downloaded the updates, installed them, I restarted, and everything continued to work.