Parallels Desktop 3 > PIECE OF CRAP

"I wonder how large projects like cPanel manage with their bleeding edge releases? Enough "newbies" play around with cPanel to flood the forum with the slightest problems."

As far as I was aware, CPanel installed their software on YOUR servers and managed the upgrades etc remotely...

If you want to patch or edit CPanel, you have to do it again and again and again after every update of the program... CPanel btw has become a big heap of crap... sadly there is no to little compition to the scale that it provides, their developers are arrogant and any requests for features or bug fixes fall on deaf ears -- and thats not comments from mom & pop hosting.

 

Parallels also doesn't even bother to reply to the people's concern ...
I was curious yesterday and checked the People being online at all time... When you check which user is actually from Parallels you will see that quite a few people from the Team including Tom Riddle, who is QA Supervisor, do lurk around the forums, but notbody seems to care to comment on any issue ...

Ah well, why do I care again ?

 

well thats why they have a forums section and a support section....

I can imagine if the team started replying to every single request for help on the forum then nobody would use support and null its purpose.. although admittedly a 'developers corner' of the forum could be insightful?


http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/06/11/wmware_announces_fusion_shipdate/ << $40 pre-order

 

I was rather talking about some sort of announcememnt since the complains getting worse .. oh and by the way .. I cannot seem to find any shop / location where you can actually pre-order it ....

 

So.... ask for your money back. From the vendor you bought it from. None of us can refund it for you.

Steve

 

Ouch! You seem like a positively charming individual. Might I suggest that you consider switching to decaf?...

Please, just go away. Scream somewhere else.

 

I am a paid customer of both Parallels, VMware and for that matter Win 4 Lin. I think that virtulazation is the future of software and want to see someone, preferably several several make it work. At some point, I'll make my decision and fail to pay the associated upgrade charges for the also-rans like I have with Win 4 Lin

 

Although I don't play games and therefore don't really care about 3D, I can understand why some of these people are so upset: the wording in the email was rather glowing about version 3's 3D capabilities. True, if you visited the product info page, you would see that such support was actually pretty limited (and I've pointed this out elsewhere on this board), but you really shouldn't have to visit the product info page to find the correct information: it should have been in the email to begin with. When you combine this with the $10-off-if-you-buy-sight-unseen offer, the whole thing begins to smell.

On another note, I wonder how much of the disappointment over performance is due to limited RAM. My MBP has only 1.5 GB of RAM, and the 3D performance of my MapSend Topo software was so slow that it was unusable, until I reduced the size of the mapped area in 3D mode. My VM is only getting a little over 400 MB of RAM, so I'm not surprised that things like this should crawl. Fortunately, a topo map is much easier to read in 2D, so this is not an issue for me.

 

Sad…

I wasn't expecting 3-D to work on all of today's hottest games, and was frankly just happy to see that I was able to play the old Half-Life just fine. So yeah, I paid for the upgrade because I happily use Parallels every day for work related purposes.

But man, skippydoodlez should be banned from the forums for being such a moron. He has contributed nothing helpful to this thread, and has in fact just worked to further enrage some people who justifiably felt lied to. I couldn't help but laugh when I saw that they promised "today's hottest games" to be working in Parallels 3.0. That's not even arguably true.

Edit: I really just went through the registration process for this forum solely to call dippystooplez a moron. Because he totally is. Also, does anybody know what happened to the Parallels Image Tool? I can't seem to find it since I upgraded to 3.0, and I needs me some more virtual disk space. I thought I'd ask while I was here…

 

Actually, I DON'T expect tons of bugs when a program is released. I do expect them in a beta, but not in a tested, official, pay to play release. I also think it was pretty sneaky for them to offer an additional $10 discount if you purchased before the product was even available for testing. This upgrade is useless and offers nothing of value above the previous version. I'm not saying it won't improve with time, but 3.0 was not a necessary upgrade and I wish I had waited.

I was so disappointed that I decided to give VMware Fusion a try. Wow! Unity blows coherence away. Plus it feels faster and the sound works much better. Now there are certainly things that Parallels has that VMware doesn't. But not enough to buy a $40 upgrade to find out.

I've actually deleted Parallels off my machine and am now running beta 4 of Fusion. I expect it to have bugs. But I don't over-expect any features because they never promised me something they couldn't deliver. My biggest reason for upgrading was the 3D comment. There was no list or demo of any kind when I was asked to upgrade. So when they say the most popular games, I fully expected Half-Life 2 to run. Well, it does run, but its definitely NOT playable.

Any my point was I don't expect this many bugs and outright lies from a full point release.

Thanks for reading,
Todd

 

I have been around the tech industry for over 30 years and seen this kind of thing many times. The circumstances surrionding this release have all the marks of a company with a cash flow issue. As a customer, I have learned to wait, wait, wait--especially in cases like this where there is no compelling reason to upgrade. As a vendor or contractor, I learned to watch the receivables aging. If anyone here knows someone who works for this company and can be completely candid, I suspect we would learn of a very stressed environment mostly related to funding and/or overextended resources.

 

Either no one noticed or I'm just crazy, but doesn't this thread title say that Parallels is greater than a piece of crap? If so, I would agree. I happen to be very happy with Parallels 3.0, and haven't had any problems... SWsoft is just hammering out some new version issues.

As someone who works in the computer industry directly with product customers on a daily basis, I understand that software/hardware will inevitably have problems when it is first released and that it sucks to be an early adopter in these cases, but I've always been able to deal with it, as have my customers.

Based on the number of problems I've read about, I will concede that perhaps an RC should have been released first, to get a wider range of "testers" for this version, and that testing may not have been as thorough as previous releases. But people are just being mean in some cases... I hardly doubt that SWsoft's intention was to release an inferior product to their customer base.

That is my 2 cents Please feel free to flame and attack as you'd like... I can take it.

 

Forget the marketing problems, this release is full of BUGS!

I received a free upgrade to 3.0, and Parallels sent me an email proclaiming this great new product. The Snapshot and SmartSelect features intrigued me because I use Parallels for software development. So I decided to do the upgrade, which IRREVERSIBLY converts your image to 3.0 - in other words, you can't go back. Anyway, within the first ten minutes I found the following problems:

* Blue screen crash on USB connection with my PDA
* My development software running at 1/4 the speed. It's excruciatingly slow now. Everything seems slower
* Much longer boot times
* OpenGL support seems to work, but the included screen savers with Windows don't even use it, so it's missing something
* Doesn't support the resolution of my monitor anymore (1680x1050), so fullscreen looks like crap
* Running a OpenGL application in fullscreen causes the system to get caught in some loop, changing the display mode on my mac every 3 seconds, forcing me to do a reboot of the mac.

I feel like an idiot for installing this piece of crap. It's not been tested enough, and is not ready for release. I don't know what to do. I can't downgrade to a previous version, because my image has already been converted. I guess I could rebuild my image from scratch, but that's gonna take a couple days. Thanks for wasting my time, Parallels! serious garbage.... I LOVED this product before, what happened?!?

E

 

In the folder with Parallels was a document that stated clearly that you should make a copy of your images, for making it possible to return to version 2.x.
If you didn't read this document and didn't make a copy, then you are to blame too and isn't it all Parallels mistake.

 

Yep, enunna stated that he uses PD for software development.... if you're a software developer, you really should've known better. I made a zip file of my Parallels folder before upgrading - I read the warnings (and being a programmer, I expected that the VM would likely be irreversibly modified before reading the warnings anyway).

I (like many) feel like I've been deceived with the marketing of PD3, but I had a free upgrade policy, so I'm not too upset. Aside from 3d, severl existing features that I relied on in PD2 are broken in PD3. That's really pretty crap - I would expect NEW features to have bugs, but to say that you have 100s of bug fixes, but appear to have more bugs then you started with is pretty bad.

Parallels have created a lot of bad sentiment with this release... I hope the management and marketing gurus haven't "taken the reigns". I want to support the little guy (Parallels), but they're not making it easy by pulling stunts like this. The 4124 release was suspiciously close to the Fusion Beta 4 release - you don't have to be a genius to draw the dots here - deflecting media attention obviously seemed more important than actually releasing a stable product.

 

It's about bugs

@Paul Sondervan,

You misunderstand me. This isn't a debate forum. Several others and myself write these long posts with several points, and then someone else replies by picking at a single point, as if it was a flaw in a mathematical proof, ignoring everything else I said. If you read carefully, I called MYSELF and idiot for installing this version, and I didn't blame parallels for it. I only blame them for their bugs. My point is that I made a mistake, and I want to let everyone else know that the release build of Parallels is garbage, and to not make the same mistake that I did. They should definitely back up their images before upgrading. I am only letting people know that this release is very buggy, be careful, and it's not in line with their previous quality. Why is there even a debate? We're not talking about race or politics here.

E

 

Not sure what all the complaining is about.....

I moved to the Mac because I hated the unreliability of Windows, the Virus infestations, adware, malware etc.

I use parallels for the few remaining applications that I need windoze for. A flight planning application and Instrument plate viewer and the update application for my road angel.

XP works perfectly under parallels and cohesive mode is fantastic as it allows me to run the apps on my mac desktop.

I have one PC in the house now which is a games machine and media centre PC connected to the TV.

It makes me wonder that if people are that hell bent on making the mac behave exactly like a PC then why don't they buy a PC rather than being so abusive to a company that makes an amazing innovative product that really bridges the gap?

I do agree that the parallels support does suck! They never return calls or emails!

 

Being an ex-cofounder of a startup company (sold company), and an IT person for nearly that long, I'd agree.

 

Absolutely no issues with 3.0 final release and only had one issue with the 2nd beta so rolled back to V2.5. Once the 3rd beta and RC came out I had no troubles. No BSODs, no crashes, No OSX failures and am using it about 9-10 hours a day.

I realise this doesn't help you if you are having problems and I know how annoying it can be when someone says "mine works" so I guess my suggestion/question is what is the difference between your install and mine? I'm running a Macbook Pro 2.33 with 3 gig installed, 160 gig drive and I'm even undervolting the CPU to reduce heat and noise. I'm running some apps like Shapeshifter and Youcontrol desktops and some other apps.

I think it would be useful to have people who are having problems to post their system specs etc and what apps/services they are running in OSX so we can see if there's anything in common?

Jason

 

Both sides are right and wrong at the same time. Nova Development deserves credit for making many solid improvements with version 3.0 and for really pushing the envelope of MacIntel virtualization in general; however, they really have overstated the support for 3D in their marketing language and, at least for me, PDM 3.0 seems to mess up my BootCamp partition to the point where it doesn't work anymore except via Parallels. That's distressing, but I'm sure they'll be a workaround or that I myself messed up somehow.

I think there are lessons to be learned by the company and by the customers: Running Windows inside Mac OS is a tough challenge, and this software brings us to the cusp of what is really needed, and I have no doubt that future versions will bring us ever closer.

In the meantime, though, it would be nice to be able to run one decent, current PC game within Parallels. Can't do that yet. I've wiped my BootCamp partition and I think I'll start over and read the documentation a bit more thoroughly this time, remembering to stick with DirectX 8.1 and nothing later, etc.