gtuhl: startup IT and software development

As a quick follow-up to the parallels-related post I made the other day, wanted to mention Parallels Tools and also a workaround for a mouse issue I was having while using it.

Parallels Tools is an excellent helper application that can be installed into the OS of your virtual machine to enable extra features and make things easier. I’ve only tried it with Vista and XP and this was with build 5162 of Parallels 3.0. Among other things, it provides:

• Seamless copy-paste from host OS to VM OS.
• Makes sharing of disks pretty dang easy, just fire up your VM and by default the C drive shows up and is accessible from your OSX desktop.
• Makes OSX aware of what applications your VM has and is running. Running apps pop into your dock like OSX apps. I at least think this was new with the Parallels Tools.

It is also very easy to install. Fire up your virtual machine, login if not already, ctrl-alt out of the VM, then select “Actions -> Install Parallels Tools” from the OSX menu of Parallels. The installer will magically run inside your virtual machine and after a reboot you will be set.

Now I had one big problem after the installation of Parallels Tools - my mouse quit working in Windows XP. I could seem to move it vertically along the left side of the monitor (but the cursor was out of view) and I could hit the start button and some of the left-most icons on the desktop but otherwise it was useless.

The fix, believe it or not, was to use windows to update the mouse driver. Not sure if this messes anything up, but my virtual machine works great now and none of the features (copy and paste from OSX to VM) appear to be negatively affected.

Using the keyboard, I did the following:

• Using tab get to the Start button and press enter.
• Arrow over Control Panel and press enter.
• Press enter on Printers and Other hardware.
• Select Mouse.
• Get to the Hardware tab. To do this use the tab key to navigate to the current tab then use the arrow keys to change tabs left and right.
• Select Properties.
• Navigate to the Driver tab.
• Press enter on Update Driver.
• For the wizard steps select “No, not this time”, Next, “Install automatically”, Next.
• Once done, reboot the virtual machine.

I couldn’t find a solution to this issue on google so hopefully this will be helpful for people hitting the same problem after me.