Encore Viewer WILL work on a Mac with Parallels

For any of my fellow Mac users out there, I did get Encore Viewer to work on the Mac with a Windows 7 VM running in Parallels.

It installed and ran just fine but would not see the Respironics SD card when inserted in the built in SD card reader on my iMac. For whatever reason, they seem to think they need to read directly from the physical device. Parallels presents the SD card to the Windows 7 Virtual Machine as a network drive and the Encore Viewer software has no way to point to a specific file path. Parallels, for its part, has no way to logically make the SD card reader appear as a physical device to the VM.

Dang. Disconnect.

I got around that problem by buying a cheapo USB SD card reader. Parallels will let you select a USB (and some other types) device and make it logically appear as a physical device to the VM. To use the SD Card reader in this manner, one clicks on Devices -> USB -> [card reader]. The Windows 7 VM happily made the "device connected" sound, installed the drivers and then saw a physical SD card reader attached to it. Encore Viewer threw an error message over the device but I clicked "Continue" a few times until it seemed to say "OK... Fine... I'll read your stupid card if you really insist". This doesn't seem to be a one time thing. It does it every time but it does always read the card. I can't seem to find a sequence of software start/card insert that doesn't cause the error message but I'm not going to stress much about it because it works!

Everything worked as if it would on a Windoze machine. I had hopes that the VM would allow the selection of any Mac printing destination to allow use of the very good PDF writer built into the OS but it seems to only be able to select either built in drivers (Fax or Microsoft XPS Document writer) or the default Mac Printer. Another that I am not worried about as I'll just dig up my favorite freeware PDF printer driver. Problem solved.

The configuration is as follows:
27" iMac with i7 quad core CPU and 8GB RAM running OS X 10.6.4
Parallels Desktop v6
VM running 32 bit MS Windows 7 Home Premium assigned logically with 1 CPU and 2GB RAM (which amusingly provides a better "Windows Experience" score than my quad core Dell with 4GB RAM that is now running Windoze Server 2008)

This is such an improvement as the only native Windoze 7 machine with an SD card reader was my netbook used primarily only for traveling and watching Netflix before I go to sleep and the screen was kinda small for reading the reports.

BTW, the netbook's days are numbered now too. I see a shiny new 11" Macbook Air in my near future