TechPedia

[ED. NOTE: Changed to a BonJour configuration as suggested by the Parallels forums. This allows your computers IP address to change without causing drive mapping difficulties. Good call guys! ]

With the release of Parallels Desktop for Mac OS X, Parallels Software has opened up a whole new world to Intel Mac owners. By utilizing the built-in features of the processor itself, Parallels has created the fastest method ever of running Windows from within your Mac.

One of the features of Parallels is the option to share a folder between Windows and your Mac. However, it is quite slow and bulky. The tutorial below, however, shows you how to harness the native sharing prowess of both Windows and your Mac, making for much faster and more reliable document sharing.

As a bonus, we’re going to show you how to make Windows use your Macs ‘Home’ folder as the ‘My Documents’ folder! No more shuffling around looking for a file you saved in one OS…everything will be in one place!

Let’s get started, shall we?

To begin, we are making the following assumptions:

You have an Intel Mac

You have installed Parallels and have created a Windows machine

Your Windows installation is Windows XP

You have a basic understanding of moving around in both platforms file systems

You have a working network connection on your Windows machine

You understand the risks of sharing folders/directories from a Windows machine, and have properly secured your Windows installation.

Are we set? Good!

Configuring OS X

The first thing we need to do is open System Preferences on our Mac.

In the System Preferences window, we want to navigate to Sharing.

In this window, we want to click the checkbox for Windows Sharing, as shown in the screenshot above.

After checking the box, you can click the Accounts button and select your account.

You should now see a message indicating that you can access your computer at a specific address, as in the screenshot. However, what you need to remember is the ‘computer name’, as seen below. If you want, you can change this to something more personal or easily recognizable.

Configuring Windows

First thing: Go to www.apple.com/bonjour and download BonJour for Windows. This will allow your Windows and Mac machines to see each other based on ‘names’ as opposed to only IP addresses. This step is VERY important!

After BonJour is installed and running, you should reboot, then continue to the next step.

Ok, open your Windows machine, and navigate to ‘My Computer’. You can do this by hitting APPLE-E on your keyboard, or clicking Start > Run > Explorer…

After Explorer has loaded, you should see the file system of your Windows machine. What we want to do next is click Tools > Map Network Drive.

You should now see a dialog similar to the one below.

The first thing to do is click on the arrow beside Drive. Choose a letter…this will be the drive that Windows uses to access your Mac. For the sake of simplicity, we’ve used M, for ‘Mac’.

Next, enter the ‘Computer Name’ from System Preferences/Sharing into the field marked Folder. Be sure to enter the slashes and folder name, just as in the System Preferences window.

Now you should click the underlined text that says different user name. This will allow you to enter the proper credentials necessary to log into your Mac. (This username/password combination should be the same as what you use on your Mac when you log on or allow a program to install.)

Click Finish, and a moment later you should see an Explorer window pop up that has the contents of your Macs’ Home folder, as seen here.

Pretty cool, huh? Now comes the fun part…sharing all of your documents between the two systems.

Share and share alike

Now that we have access to our Mac, we can tell Windows that instead of storing our documents and files in our Parallels image, it can simply put them on our real hard drive.

If you don’t want to do this, stop here! But if you’re looking for a clean and fast method of working with your Mac and PC, this is the way to go.

To begin, we’re making the following assumptions:

You understand that when you relocate your My Documents folder, your Mac will have those folders placed on its hard drive, including My Pictures and all of the other folders Windows uses.

You understand that if something goes wrong, it’s not our fault! These instructions have been tried several times now with no issues at all. But just in case, we don’t want you to be mad if something breaks!

Ok, let’s get started!

Open an Explorer window again. Using your mouse or keypad, right click/context click the My Documents folder. A menu should pop up, as in the screenshot below.

Click Properties.

You should now see a window like this one:

What we’re going to do is tell Windows that My Documents isn’t in the location currently in the Target field, but is actually in another location. Namely, on your Mac!

So, click the Move… button, and you will be presented with the dialog below:

What you will need to do is select your recently mapped drive (M, in our examples case). Click the + sign in front of the drive, and drill down until you see your Documents folder. Select it, then click OK.

You may be prompted by Windows as to whether or not you want to move your existing documents to the new location. That’s your choice, but we would recommend doing so…in this way, you can guarantee that you’re not going to lose files.

After confirming your decision to move My Documents, you can now open My Documents and you should see the contents of your Macs Documents folder!

Just like that, you have quick and easy access to any documents you save or create on either platform.

A quick note: What you might want to do is create a folder specifically for Windows stuff, as in the image below. This will give you a place to dump files that are specific to Windows, such as programs or downloads. This will keep you from cluttering up your Macs Documents.

You can also add that folder to your Finder windows for quick access, simply by dragging and dropping it. Oh, and one more thing: want to quickly get to your Mac Desktop? Drag a shortcut to your Windows desktop or QuickLaunch bar. Boom, instant access!

IMPORTANT! See the red circle in the screenshot above? What this is referencing is how Windows sees Mac applications. It appends .app to the filename, and displays it as a folder. Be VERY careful if you open a .app folder in Windows. If you make a change, you might break the program so it won’t work on your Mac!

That’s the end of this road…please let us know if you have any questions, comments or enhancements, and enjoy your newly integrated computers!