Hello I am currently doing the 2 week trial to evaluate against VMWare. So far in most ways I am happy with it but.... Whenever anything happens under the guest such as compiling software, or doing large file finds, registry cleaning etc, the host machine is kind of locked up completely. The Mouse stops working or works in large jerky movements jumping across the screen I never experienced any inability to use the host under vmware. Conditions are. P4 2.8ghz Asus laptop with a 7200rmp 80gb drive, 1gb 333mhz ram. maximium guest ram set to 550mb and the single guest at 480mb. Paralells tools is installed. and I run dual monitor. If anyone else suffers this or knows of anything...
Doh! Winxp pro sp2 for guest and host. Follow up: realised focus priority of guest was set to high. Changed this to normal and it has helped, but still not perfect. The main reason I am looking at changing from VMware is the MAC support, and it looks like the MAC version is far closer to VMWare features and sounds better. And if I change to mac, all the other people still need to be able to share Virtual machine images... Thanks for any help/suggestions
Also, main purpose of using the virtual machine is to isolate Software Development environment and QA testing environment, so performance is important. So far i've found that apart from a few squeaky things like this performance is very similar to VMWare. For the price its damn good stuff!