3186 and unexpected shutdowns

I have one question and one question only. Do the unexpected shutdowns persist in 3186? It is a the latest official release and not a beta, right. If the problem is not fixed, I'm switching to Fusion. Thanks in advance.

 

having never had unexpected shutdowns, for me, no it doesnt... I guess the simple answer is, try it and see.. (maybe a clean vm ?) .. if not, then enjoy fusion and all the bugs its going to offer you whilst in beta..

 

I would stick with Parallels if I were you. They have almost perfected this VM thing. Why start all over with Fusion and all the headaches all over again?

 

I have now had 2 fatal crashes of 3186. It just closes parallels straight down with a a fatal exception. Never had it withnay other build. I'm considering going back to the previous RC3.

Anyone else having this?

Paul

 

Previously Parallels would crash after 24 hours of use. I've had 3186 running since it released without issues (so far). I'm going to continue running... hopefully I won't see any issues.

If you've having a problem make sure you call or email support. MAKE THEM FIX THIS.

It's been reported countless times during the beta process. Now that this is GA they need to support it. If not I'd move to VMWare as soon as it releases. Their Windows products are top notch... that's they they are the leader in the industry.

 

Hi,

I'm still getting the Fatal Exception In Virtual Machine monitor errors when trying to run Windows 2000 as I reported with every beta after 3036. Works fine on the same machine with Windows XP SP2.

Come on Parallels! I reported this error a load of times and have had no response, not any questions. It's as if you couldn't care as you already have my money.

I would recommend VMWare, but on 1 of the three machines I've tested the Beta on, it took the system out and I had to do a clean re-install as OS X wouldn't even start, so my advice would be to leave it for now

I'd definitely recommend VMWare when it is complete on the strength of their Windows VMWare Workstation/Player products which are amazingly good.

Cheers,
Josh

 

3186 Reboots

Every time I invoke Coherence.

 

Fusion already offers features that didn't appear until later in Parallels like drag and drop between OSs. VMWare has a proven trackrecord in the virtualisation industry. I have a major problem with the latest official release not fixing the BIGGEST BUG of all, which has been reported times and times and times and times and times AND TIMES AGAIN. Better an average product that works rather than a better one that doesn't. It's freakin common sense 101. Since 1970 the stability has deteriorated with each new release. So ok, betas were betas and betas are buggy; but 3186 is an official release, folks. Unacceptable. Now don't get me wrong, I paid for a license with Parallels so I'll keep updating, but VMWare's pup is starting to look better and better...and they just released their Beta2 by the way.

 

I couldn't disagree with you more. But, as we used to say, "It's a free country". Of course some would argue that isn't true any longer, or at least in the same ways, in the US.

I find 3186 to be stable and very full featured and am doing almost all of my Windows-based software development using it.

 

How come the thing crashes on so many people, then?

 

cos lots of people upgraded their BETA copies (who knows what suprious crap was left behind).... uninstall the beta, reboot, installed 3186 and use a new VM (dont try update the BETA tools)... bit like updating windows.. always better to be clean that upgraded.

 

Tell you what. I haven't experienced any unexpected shutdowns in 3186. Why? Because I can hardly access my guest OS anymore!! 3186 worked fine the first 2 or 3 times I used it, but since then I am getting a "fatal error message in VM monitor" message at VM startup. I need to restart the VM two or three times to finally get to Windows and even then the VM shuts down after a minute or so, giving me the same fatal error message.

Great going, Parallels.

 

3186 still crashes ...

... every hour or two when running certain programs.
I've sent in crash reports (as I have with each of the
betas and rcs), but it seems that there's a serious
bug that remains unsolved. I do think it a bit shoddy
of Parallels to have not addressed this bug prior to final
release.

 

I had crashing issues similar until I did manual uninstall of Parallel Tools and Reinstall.
I made sure that when i did this upgrade that auto coherence mode was off.

Not sure if it did anything or just made me feel better, but regular crashing stopped.

I also have set my memory to fixed amount and not auto adjust.
I also don't have parallels start in coherence mode it is trivial to switch it, I have startup programs in XP that would kick it to full anyway on startup so the flickering was annoying.

Once XP is started I switch to coherence and leave it. I have not shut it off since 3186 came out.

 

3186 seems stable for me (amazingly)

I took the plunge and updated to 3186 (XP). As I've reported in other threads, every recent beta build was very unstable (unexpected quits typically within 2 hours). I was getting by with Build 3120 by setting reserve memory to manual (1024MB) and setting XP RAM to 386-512MB.

As with every RC beta upgrade, I uninstalled Parallels tools within XP, restarted XP, shutdown XP. Uninstalled Parallels using their uninstaller and deleted the preference files (.plist) in ~Library/Preferences. Except this time (with 3186), I also deleted the .pvs file (I had never done that before). When I installed 3186, I had to choose some Custom or Advanced setting to reimport my XP .hdd file. Upon booting XP for the first time, XP informed me I had to reactivate (this is the first time I've ever had to do this and I'm not sure if it was related to deleting the .pvs or upgrading to 3186).

In any case, Parallels 3186 has run 40 hours straight without crashing (with reserve mem set to auto, XP RAM=512MB, Coherence on, and all the other bells and whistles on (animations, etc). I'm pleasantly surprised since I had just about given up on Parallels.

So now I have to a) give them credit for apparently fixing the crashing issue for my particular setup or b) apologize for never deleting my .pvs file before. I doubt the pvs file had anything to do with this as the "reserve memory" workaround worked repeatedly for me with Build 3120 (after numerous installs/uninstalls of the other betas).

 

To make a long story short, one shouldn't have to jump through hoops like that in order to install and run a simple upgrade, period.

 

Agreed 100%. Believe me, I was super frustrated with all the recent builds. But after stepping back, we have to remember that we were running betas. No one forced us to try these out. I really don't know how things would have worked out had I upgraded directly from 1970. I probably have a backup somewhere to test the theory but I really don't care anymore. I've spent way too much time screwing around and it looks like Parallels is working for me now. I share your frustration and will keep a watchful eye on Fusion. Good luck

 

I upgraded from 1970, not a Beta. I'm glad it's all working well for you though.

 

But didn't you try some of the beta builds? And if so, I'm wondering if those attempts somehow corrupted either your .hdd file and/or .pvs file. Or did you upgrade from backed-up 1970 .hdd and .pvs files which never went through any upgrade?

Yes, in an ideal world, our upgrade from 1970 to 3186 should have been seamless. But this upgrade was pretty substantial and I wonder if a major OS upgrade (OSX 10.3 to 10.4, for example) is a proper analogy. Yes, you can upgrade over an existing OS installation. But you're probably better off doing a clean install (which is more time-consuming in the short-term but could pay off troubleshooting headaches in the long-term). So perhaps the best long-term upgrade strategy for Parallels 2.0 to 2.5 is to clean install your XP image.

Yes it's a royal pain. But your choices are to stick with 1970, use only Boot Camp, or wait for Fusion. I offered a slightly less painful workaround (YMMV) that took perhaps 10 minutes (but at the cost of an XP reactivation).

I'm not trying to defend Parallels lack of support (I'm very unsatisfied with their customer service). But from their standpoint, perhaps only a handful of us have been running into the 'unexpected quit' issue (and perhaps the issue is rooted into something they can't control such as bad RAM, third-party software, upgrading over an improperly shutdown image, etc.). It's very hard to gauge the frequency of a problem from forum discussions alone since they're biased towards reporting problems.

Anyway, good luck to you and everyone else. Seems like we'll need it

 

I did run some 3xxx betas for a while but deleted the last one I used and reinstalled 1970 clean. I upgraded to 3186 from there.