Good grief, am I the only one happy with PD 3?

Reading some of the posts on this message board makes me wonder if I am the only Parallels customer actually happy with the 3.0 upgrade!

Snapshot support, working Linux tools, working printer emulation, on-the-fly resolution switching, and several other new features made this upgrade worth the cost for me, at least.

I use Parallels daily to accomplish my work, using Windows XP and Linux guests. Works like a charm. No problems to speak of.

And before you flame me accusing me of being some deranged Parallels fanboy, freaking grow up - I'm not. I'm just happy with the product. I use what works, and this software works well for me.

A note to the Parallels folks: good job on a huge release. I, for one, am happy with the upgrade. And I'd let you know if I wasn't.

These forums are becoming less and less valuable, however - people are afraid to post for fear of being flamed by one of the chest-beating bozos running wild here. IMHO, the Parallels folks seriously need to re-work their terms of service with these boards and start moderating them. Make the forums easier to get to and require email registration with an actual moderator for people to sign up. And ban some of these jerks who consistently post abrasive, insulting, and immature messages.

And to those of you who insist upon making this a hostile environment - GROW UP. Yes, the software has problems. Yes, the support for D3D games is massively overstated by marketing. But there are more constructive ways of expressing your disappointment. "VMWare Fusion will be far superior!" you shout. Great. Stop posting here and pay the extra $100 for that title when it is finally released - we're sick of listening to you.

 

No - I'm 90% happy and when they fix my concern I'll be back to 100%. Most problems I see are people not reading the docs, not following best practices, being prone to being whiney, expectations out of line with reality, and some genuine problems with the software. There seems to have been some regression with some problems - Cisco VPN, for example, but too it may be that work-arounds applied to earlier problems are now the problem, Parallels having corrected the reason for work-arounds.

Parallels is a good product with an adventurous dev and feature release schedule, and sometimes it bites them on the butt. They also seem to have a pre-pubescent demographic with little computer experience and certainly little virtual machine experience based on many of the self-inflicted problems that have followed the 4124 release.

 

support forums...

It's okay, these forums are a place for constructive venting. We have all had experiences of pulling our hair out cursing the software gods for the strife that beset us.

Sometimes it can all be quite overwhelming, no matter how mild mannered the person may be, and let loose a torrent of tempestual rage.

So it is we kindly reply, after the dust has settled and seek to resolve unsettled problems and questions.

Yes, all software is flawed just as we are. And yes I have a problem, that's why I have come here to these forums! he, he...

cheers! And may all venting be fruitfull

 

I certainly didn't mean to imply that people shouldn't complain. I just wish they could do so in more mature manner. I had a neighbor recently tell me about a problem that she had with her Parallels and she had just dealt with it rather than posting here for fear of being bashed on these forums.

That's just not right.

A funny side note - I actually read through the users manual yesterday, cover-to-cover. It's an *excellent* manual. Having been in the driver's seat for several commercial software projects, I know this is no small feat. Kudos to the technical writers. Highly recommend reading the manual - it's well done and informative. Not exactly stunning, edge-of-the-seat excitement, but useful information nonetheless.

Re the Cisco VPN issues: rumor has it that the latest Mac UB build from Cisco is extremely stable. I've also heard good things about VPN Tracker from Equinux, though I haven't tried it. I was thoroughly unimpressed with the summer 2006 release of the Cisco VPN client, which rendered my brand-new mac pro unbootable. Not exactly a shining introduction to the world of Mac.

 

I really dig it too, I just dont dig how vista is such a resource hog compared to xp

 

That is true even if you run it on a Dell. That's a Microsoft problem, not a Parallels problem. I don't understand what problem exists for which Vista is the preferred solution

 

I have yet to see a compelling reason to upgrade to Vista. Massive resource requirements for some eye candy - kind of hard to justify. XP runs extremely well (IMHO) under Parallels, so why bother?

 

Amen!
Like I've said to many of the minions - "RTFM!"

ajm

 

This is THE Parallels support forum. People come here because they have problems with the product. I am happy that 3.0 works out for you. But why do you want to discourage people to post here? It is like telling the sicks in the emergency room: "I feel great, stop complaining, go home".

I don't expect Parallels deliver a perfect product but I do expect a responsive support when I run into problem. Have you noticed that Parallels support is cherry picking the easy ones to response and simply ignoring the rest? No wonder there are so many unhappy customers.

 

No, he's encouraging legitimate posting.

He's discouraging the mindless trolling about how "this product's CRAP and DOESNT WORK" that is constantly repeating itself in any threat concerning a bug or a problem.

As for the support- apparently you don't work in tech support. Cherry picking goes on because you get a larger number of fixes through.

Why spend 8 hours on a fix that an obscure program that only one user out of the entire userbase uses, when you can use that 8 hours to fix 40 simpler problems, and set aside the complex one for a developer that is better suited for fixing it, as it may concern an internal programming flaw?


As for the original topic, I'm very happy with the upgrade I'm excited to see further 3d support development, as this was the only previous reason I need a normal computer set aside for games and CAD/Maya work.

 

I too am happy.

It seems faster running XP than before. My only challenge so far is a USB issue that I suspect is already being resolved as it was reported earlier.

In reading some of the posts I have to agree that they're aggressive - and the more aggressive they are the less useful they seem to be. It's one thing to specify an issue that seems defective (playing the ball), and quite another to use that to play the man and infer that the entire Parallels team is lacking in integrity for releasing a product does not seem to be quite perfect.

 

I have to say I'm also discouraged by the expectation some users have of a dot-zero release, and that they expect a very complicated program like Parallels to work perfectly right away with every single possible combination of software.

P3.0 runs XP better than ever in 2d mode. Some things work really well in 3d mode too. And with little CPU impact -- clearly they've done some real nice magic to get DX8 to use OSX side hardware acceleration. Whomever at parallels is working on that code should be proud. It's a great hack of the best kind.

Anyhow, I'm sure I'll run into odd problems with P3 as I push its limits, but for now I'm happy to see real progress on the integration and performance front.

 

I have been very very happy with Parallels since the first public betas, and I'm happy with 3.0. Based on past experience, I expect that we'll see an increase in game compatability as time goes on and the fact that SMP and Guest 64-bit OS (which few of us will actually need, but will be nice to have) will be free upgrades for 3.0 users is icing on the cake.

I also know how to use the search feature, and 99% of the time I've had problems, others have had the same problem and have already discussed and found solutions (or Parallels staff has helped them find a solution). Too many of the "OMG THIS DOESN'T WORK" threads have been answered in the past and people are just too lazy to search.

 

I'm happy with 3.0 too. Like I said before, just wait for 3.5 (which that be a free upgrade from 3.0.) I'll bet that Parallels' 3D technology will be much improved. Technology especially new technology needs time to develop that's all.

 

I don't know that it is even practical to emulate all 3D features. Dedicated hardware is pretty fast, and to expect the VM's CPU's to recreate that, features and performance, may be unachievable. Another possibility is hardware pass-through but that means either OS X or Windows but not both. This really is why BootCamp remains important. Too bad it is stuck in beta mode.

 

i think forums are like news-channels sometimes. news-channels too usually only report bad things, which makes sense i guess.

i'm pretty sure there are far far more happy pd 3.0 users than the ones unhappy and ranting/ venting here.

as for me i'm very happy with pd 3.0 and think the performance increased and the 3d acceleration is significantly noticeable.

 

I'm happy with it. It's faster and SmartStart is what I've been requesting for a long time.

 

Since Parallels runs at the same time as OS 10, the speed is never going to be as fast as running Boot Camp, is it? All the 3-d support in the world isn't going to change that fact! Shared processors will never be faster than dedicated ones.

At this point, upgrading to 3.0 is silly for me since 3188 works just fine for my needs. Indeed, it's hard to imagine it can get any better than it already is for me. It would be like moving on to Vista when XP is working just fine.

 

Oh, so you're happy with the upgrade? You should've mentioned that earlier, no one could tell. Especially since you went on a technical support forum and responded to every single complaint that any user had with the comment that it's all the user's fault, they're whining, and need to shut up. This is exactly the kind of behavior buzzdat is talking about.

Expecting the software to work as advertised is not an unrealistic expectation.

Telling users that they can only get the upgrade price on the software if they pay the company without seeing a detailed release note, or getting a chance to try out the software, does not build goodwill with the customer base. When you rush your user base into buying the software and then under-deliver on your promised feature set, that just feels like a fly-by-night operation and it really doesn't inspire confidence in the product.

And hinting that users can use cracked versions of software to get around problems caused by copy-protection is completely unacceptable.

The ironic thing is that they could've avoided so much of this had they not insisted on making the Direct3D support such a major selling point. From the sound of it, there are plenty of features that other users will find useful, and they work.

In my case, I never saw any explicit mention that the BootCamp partition under Vista would be supported with 3.0. So I bought it on the chance that it would work, and the promise that the games I wanted to play would be supported. As it turns out, the BootCamp partition is supported, it works flawlessly for me, and I was pleasantly surprised.

If they had just been up-front with the customers from the start, and said explicitly that this is what works and this is what doesn't (I saw no mention that nothing over DirectX 8.1 would be supported in any of the pre-release documentation), then there wouldn't have been such a big problem. I read all the press I could see on this site at the time, all of the postings about the release in various blogs, and the e-mail that was sent to me from the company -- saying that I had "unrealistic expectations" or didn't do my research is just plain false.

As it is now, I'm not demanding a refund, because I'm optimistic that they'll get the stuff working eventually, and none of the stuff I need is mission-critical. But I can guarantee that I'll never buy anything from the company again without trying it out first. I used to be really impressed with Parallels -- it just worked, and they seemed to over-deliver on their promises. Now, I just plain don't trust them.

 

You're misquoting me. I fully expect people to post their problems here, as well as to express their disappointment with the current release. The thing that bothers me is the rabid flaming of other users, aggressively replying to people's posts, and extreme/immature language. People are avoiding posting their problems here for fear of being bashed - that's not right.

Do people *honestly* expect their complaint to be taken seriously when they post something along the lines of "this release is CRAP!" and "SWSoft has ripped us all off and should give us a refund!". I wouldn't be surprised if support simply ignored posts like this.

I *totally* understand people being PO'd about the marketing vs reality, especially in regards to the 3D support. This happens *all of the time* when a small company releases a product which ends up being far more popular than they had expected - they grow too fast, and marketing/management starts making promises that has little or nothing to do with the realities of the product. It's hardly unique to SWSoft and Parallels.

People need to keep a couple of things in mind. First, this is a dot-zero release; these nearly *always* have issues, sometimes serious. More importantly, however, is that people need to RTFM before angrily posting here - a huge number of people's flaming initial posts are regarding issues that they could have easily resolved if they had just read the documentation.

Another issue that really surprises me is that so many people are complaining about "having" to fork over the cost for the upgrade before testing the product. The "early upgrade" bonus was ONLY $10 OFF of the current upgrade price. SWSoft offers very generous trial periods - there's really no reason not to try the product out before buying it. People purchased the upgrade blindly and then threw a fit when it didn't do exactly what the marketing literature said it would.

Let me say that again: the *marketing* literature.

This is hardly the first time that a product has been over-represented by marketing. You should *always* test out a piece of software before committing to a purchase, regardless of vendor.