windows

I thought I'd post my experience here, for the benefit of others, because I couldn't find a whole lot of information about this specific use of an external USB flash drive.

I have a MacBook Air with a dainty 128GB SSD drive, so I try to keep large files that I rarely use on external drives. I have plenty of external USB and FireWire storage (over 6 TB), and running VMs in either Parallels or VMWare Fusion works great (very highly performant) off any of these external drives.

(This tip should also work similarly with Vista, Windows 7, etc.).

After browsing around a bunch of different forums, the MAMP site, and Parallels documentation, I was still flummoxed by Parallels' weird Shared Host networking behavior, which seemingly didn't allow me to access virtualhosts I set up with MAMP for developing sites locally.

Here's a quickie: A lot of Mac users are on Windows networks, and need to sometimes connect to a shared folder on their network to share/retrieve documents with other Windows users. The easiest way to do this is to type in the path to the shared folder in the "Connect to Server..." dialog box. To do this, just:

1. Switch to the Finder.
2. Choose the "Connect to Server..." menu option in the Go menu (or press Command-K).
3. Type in the path to your windows shared folder as follows:

smb://SERVER_NAME/share-name/folder-name