Parallels Desktop 6 available for Macs on 14 September

Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac will be available on general release from 14 September, the company said in a statement sent out on 9 September.

The software — which allows the Mac OS X platform to run Windows within a virtual environment — has been available to existing customers since its announcement last week, attracting an upgrade cost of £34.99.

According to the company, the full version of Parallels Desktop 6 — on sale tomorrow — will cost $79.99 (around £52) and is said to offer significant benefits over the existing version, including a 40 percent improvement in graphics handling (scored using a 3DMark 2006 comparison) and a 41 percent increases in speed running Windows programs.

Parallels has added a number of new features to the software such as 64-bit and surround sound support, as well as including Mac OS X parental controls and keyboard shortcuts within the Windows environment.

Existing functionality has also been tweaked to facilitate smoother importing of VMWare, Virtual PC virtual machines and Boot Camp partitions. Parallels Desktop 6 also includes a copy of Kaspersky antivirus for Windows and Mac too.

Mac OS X users can choose whether to dual boot machines using a boot manager or can instead run Windows from within Parallels Desktop 6 in a virtual environment.

The ability to run multiple operating systems can offer familiarity benefits to people needing to transition to a new platform, as well as allowing them to use software that is unsupported by some operating systems or that they may have already purchased a license for on a different platforms.