Parallels Desktop 4.0 Coversion unmitigated disaster and dangerous

First let me say that v 3.0 was decent -- not great, but decent. My biggest issue was coherence: it took a little bit of work to get it right, but when I did it was OK. The problem was that I had to move the little bar in display arrangement to the top display; otherwise I could only use 2 displays if I placed the display that I use on top to the side. A bit annoying and quirrky, but once I figured it out it was great. But, here are the v 3.0 disasters:

1. Unfortunately, very, very, very unfortunately, I made a virtual machine w/ BootCamp in v3.0. That was a disastrous error b/c (a) when I tried to boot up in windows using BootCamp -- I got this message about a FATAL error:

"c000021a (Fatal System Error)
The Windows Logon Process System process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0xc0000005 (0x0000000 0x00000000). The system has been shut down."

Sorry for putting that in bold, but, as you can imagine, I was quite irked. It was probably a validation problem since everytime I booted into Bootcamp and later used Parallels in Leopard, I had to re-validate. I don't know. Whatever our license, they let me re-install and validate many, many times and I don't think that non-validation would dis-allow booting.

In any event, I was able to use the Parallels BootCamp VM machine, but there are times when I just need to boot directly into BotCamp XP for work. It seemed to me that Parallels v3.0 had essentially "hijacked" my botcamp partition. Didn't give me so much happiness with Parallels, because "simply" re-installing meant losing programs and important client info and, anyway, without buying a new copy of XP is simply too expensive at this point. Most importantly, any company email comes to an account that stores them on my C (Parallels / hijacked BootCamp) drive. Client confidentiality makes Microsoft Exchange a big no-no for us. Furthermore, my c: drive has important company specific software and network settings -- re-doing and re-installing evrything cost my company about $3,200.00 of lost billable hours and left my Boss with no end of complaints about using a Mac in a wintel work place. Great!

2. I used Outlook in "Office Basic 2003" -- so, to be honest, if I could figure out how to find those emails (while I cannot boot to the BootCamp partition, I seem to be able to access files there via as earch of the bootcamp drive), I'd probably stop b****ching. The industry specific technology that the company uses has been problematic to install -- I've to basically use the applications from shared folders, and I spent 17 hours straight trying to get them onto the new, non-BootCamp, VM I had to creat using v4.0. That's not really a Paralles problem (at least I don't think it is), but I wouldn't have to do it if I'd not had so much trouble with the BootCamp hijack. I'm sure that there is something somewhere that said --"hey, you'll never be able to boot up into BootCamp again unless you re-install windows XP!", but I didn't see it.

 

If boot camp is not working after upgrade under Parallels Desktop, you can create a new virtual machien based on existing boot camp partition. Almost surely it will work.