Setting up Network connection in Parallel Win XP

Bridged is where the VM acts independently of the host machine so it gets it's own IP from your DHCP server and means you can access all your network services as if it's a real machine on your network

Shared is where the host machine acts as a NAT server so your guest network is private with the host machine - you can't access the guest from another machine on the network OR access network services from the guest.

With both modes you CAN however access the Internet and outside world.

Advantages of bridged is that you can have your guest acting like any other machine on the network.

Advantages of shared is that if you're using a Wifi network or network that is tied to the Mac address of your host, your guest can piggy back this and use the same connection.

I would imagine that shared may be slightly slower (but marginally) due to the NAT going on although I can't prove that.

Windows XP installation in Mac with Parallel

I have been trying hard to install Windows XP in Mac.
So I thought let me post my experience. I had Windows XP on my hard disk.

So the first thing that I did was I copied the same on a CD and tried with it, but it didn't worked. It took me a while to understand why it is not working, and then I figured out that parallel needs a bootable disc.

So I created a bootable disk with Nero, and copied the Windows XP from my hard drive.
After doing this Parallel has accepted the CD, but after running for few sec I saw A:\>,
When I saw the command prompt.. I saw the follwong
No FAT32 Volumes Found, exiting.....
No NTFS Volume found, exiting....
and then A:\>
Now once again another problem, and the problem is to figure out what went wrong and the problem was that Parallel needs a Windows XP bootable disc, not a normal bootable i.e. DOS bootable which can't recognize FAT32 or NTFS, and that's why I was getting A:\>

So the next step was to find out how to create a windows XP bootable disc, after searching a lot on google and wasting a couple of CD I found the following link, which works perfectly.
http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=297

Finally I was able to create a Windows XP bootable CD, and run it on MAC.