Hello forum, this is my first post here Since I realize the importance of virtualization, I started to research wich application best meet my needs, so I tried VMWare's offer, Virtual PC 2007 -this is free by the way-, Parallels Workstation and Altiris SVS (wich I will not discuse here). First, I would like to say I don't like VMWare, it may be an excellent application with a lot of features and a very stable and compatible base but it's too veeeery slow, no matter how well host and VM OSes are tunned. Also, I don't like the lot of services it keeps running all the time no matter you are running a virtualized OS or not - VMWare uses a lot of resources and CPU cycling for my taste. Then I tried VPC2007, wich surprise me a lot because I found it very reliable. I didn't try the previous version, 2004, but doing little research shows it was not pretty good and people really don't like it. But I found this new version very very good if not excellent. Last I installed Parallels and after testing it for a while I have crossed feelings. I definitely LOVE the speed it gives to the guest OS, believe it or not the guest is fastest than host -both XPsp2 spanish-. I don't know how you guys do this but I hope you don't just tweak priorities to make guest run faster. There's a bunch of applications out there that claims to speed Windows by boosting it up to %500 and it's true, BUT they don't tell you they're screwing up the whole system tweaking priorities and other better-not-touch kernel features of Windows -and I'm not talking about serious tweakers like TuneUp2007, Tweaki... 4 power users and so on. This way they reduce the time CPU needs to access disk, memory, USB and so on but it's likely you will have lot of hangs and application crashes - and sure finally the whole system doom. But, as I was saying before, I liked very much Parallels speed but not too much the incredible high amount of ram it seems need to operate because when running a VM you can see the Parallels process to start consuming ram up to 80 megs to just then drop to some few megabytes and start climbing again. Is this behaviour normal? VirtualPC2007 just uses 10megs and seems to run very good - ok, a little slower but not too much too. Well, after that little introduction here is the question that names this thread. I have connectivity problems with Parallels. I experienced that with VMWare and VirtualPC too but after choosing NAT for connection type they're solved. My problem is I can't find a way to use NAT in Parallels. I can choose from Bridged and other one but not NAT. So, are you people having the same issue? Can't you connect to Internet or LAN from a virtualized guest XP? Is there any way I can use NAT in Parallels to solve this problem? Where is this feature located or how can I do to enable it? The right-click menu of the network icon don't shows NAT, nor the networking dialog when editing a VM properties. Thank you very much for your help and time!! Best, MartÃn Runing a PIV Prescott 2.4ghz, 1 GB RAM, WinXPsp2 Spanish (LA).
Two days and still not response??? Well, this is a beautiful designed forum, and VERY POOR MAINTAINED ONE. I even don't want to guess how bad the customer support could be... I'll stick to Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 for now, a very good virtualizer FOR FREE
Perhaps you are unaware of the purpose of this forum. This, and the other forums on this site are USER forums, and the answers you get here are from USERS who are all volunteers and will discuss issues they know something about and have time for. The Parallels folks SOMETIMES post here, but this isn't a customer support forum, it's a peer support forum. The best place to ask technical questions is the technical forum appropriate to your host operating system. You appear to be using an XP host, so the workstation for Windows and Linux would be the place to expect answers from someone who might have a similar configuration. Most of the posters on this forum are Mac users who probably can't help you, which would explain why no one answered you. So use whatever you like, but there's no point complaining that this forum isn't set up to match your expectations.
Thanks Dear joem, I don't know what people see on Macs, I have used lot of them in the past and still seems to me like a super cool microwave, or a kick-ass freezer you know. Mac forum? I didn't saw that when first enter these forums... anyway, thanks for clarifying that, I will try your suggestion but I'm already a happy user of VirtualPC2007 (for free bucks).
