If you need to have access to more than one operating system in a hurry, then Parallels is a decent enough solution. It’s not without its problems though. For example, I’m using a Graphire3 tablet in conjunction with a an iMac running WindowsXP SP3 on Parallels. The tablet was detected as a mouse and completely lost all of its pressure sensitivity! The tablet will only register X/Y positional data, which is pretty useless.
If you have this problem, here’s how you might fix it:
1) Uninstall any drivers you already have associated with the device on your guest OS. This will help to avoid possible conflicts.
2) Under the Parallels “Virtual Machine” menu select “Uninstall Parallels Tools”. These are a set of programs that do some interesting things with connectivity between your VM and your host OS, such as linking your desktops or automatically sharing folders and devices. In our case, we don’t want it to automatically detect and share the Wacom tablet because it doesn’t know the difference between a tablet and a mouse! At this point you should be prompted to restart your VM.
3) After rebooting, plug in your tablet.
4) Under the Parallels “Devices” menu select USB and then find your tablet. It should be listed under its model number. This will connect the device to your guest OS and remove it from your host OS. It should now have a check-mark next to it.
5) Download and install the proper drivers from Wacom.com.
Just wanted to share this in case someone else has the same problem. The thing is that the Parallels Tools software outsmarts itself and instead of treating the tablet like any other device, it thinks it’s just a pointing device so it takes shortcuts to seamlessly integrate it across your VM and host OS and assumes that the only thing a pointing device needs to do is point. Apparently the good people at Parallels have never heard of pressure sensitivity.
You can test if your tablet is working on the following page if you don’t have any familiar graphics programs installed: