Having been a Parallels For Mac user since the early Beta releases one of the things that I have learned to live with has been the lack of support for a second monitor when switching into Coherence mode. When this new feature was first launched I was pretty disappointed to discover that Windows apps could only exist on the primary monitor and could not be dragged across onto a second one. At that time I did do a bit of digging around on the Parallels forums and found a number of users who were complaining about this same omission. Since then to be honest I have not checked back to see if this feature was still on the to be released list, and in fact when I downloaded build 5160 a couple of days ago I did actually try dragging a window across onto my other monitor and sure enough it still didn’t work. Then today, whilst looking at the VM settings for my Windows XP I realised that the feature was there but not enabled in my settings.

To enable this setting you have to first of all Stop your running VM to get into the Configuration Editor ( select Edit Menu, Virtual Machine option. Once in the editor select Coherence in the Options on the left hand pane and you should see the options below

Tick the box for Use Multiple Displays and you should find that Coherence mode now fully supports your extended desktop.

Great stuff. This added to proper support for Expose in the latest build firmly fixes Parallels at the front of the Mac Virtualisation solutions queue as far as I am concerned.

Well done to the Parallels team.

[tags]Mac, OSX, Parallels, Virtualisation[/tags]