Parallels Is Ignoring Us

I'm sure there are many of you out there that feel the same way. I've sent in beta feedback but no follow ups are sent back to me. This could easily be solved w/ something like what Novell does w/ Suse bugs (Bugzilla). There are no release notes to indicate why 3186 changed to 3188. The customer has a right to know what has changed between released versions. Lots of bugs are showing up now and lots of complaints for support (or lack-there-of).
Just reading all of these threads in the Mac section has made me glad that I still havent purchased a license key and wasted $80. I wouldnt be surprised if Parallels keys start showing up on eBay either (as someone mentioned in another thread).

Soon as VMWare Fusion gets released, there's going to be a lot of switchers I'm guessing.

Poll: What do you think of the Parallels for Mac Desktop right now?

I'm curious how poll results would show on a scale of:

Very Happy, Happy, Neutral, Sad, Disappointed

 

Frankly, I love the product! I have not had too many issues, and none that don't get resolved. 3188 had caused my USB FlashDrive to freeze the system, but I'm sure that will be fixed in due time.

I was an early adopter of Parallels and knew going in that it would be a "Work in Progress" for some time. If you are that dissatisfied, don't use it! BootCamp is a viable alternative, even if you can't run both OS X and Vista at the same time.

If I have any issues at all it is that I wish I could get the "Full Vista Experience" - and not because I'm a fan, but because it would match what my customers use on thier PC's. I'd reallly like to see Aero....

Bob

 

very happy

Happy enough to pay the $80 after the trial expired. Would have paid a bit more too.

 

Oh, and I have to say the poll idea is a bit lame. Seems to me there are mostly two kinds of users in the forums. Users with problems, and a few looking for tricks and tweaks. Do you really need a poll to tell you what folks here think, or are you just looking to grind your axe?

 

I'm happy with the product - unimpressed with their customer service... Also the fact that they don't honor their rebates is a huge deal.. apparently they'll only send the rebate check out is if you call and complain (it's been 4 months and no check).

 

I'll take the poll and say "happy" on the product, but extremely displeased with response to issues. I made a post earlier today in the General Forum regarding that very topic. Parallels works great for me running XP and Fedora 6. I'm pleased with performance, tools and general operation, speed, stability etc. It's only the support issue. If they have a staffing problem then for heaven's sake get an autoresponder and then ANSWER people even if it's "...we haven't forgotten your request. We're swamped but we will respond as quickly as possible" follow up a couple of days later. Just plain good will would be nice. Like you said, I'm afraid that VMWare will spell the doom of Parallels if they don't get it together. I'll say it again...love the product, the support, not so much.

Steve

 

The poll should probably isolate Parallels the products from Parallels the company.

 

Agree with all of you. New to Parallels. Great product although there are many bugs. The support is one of the worst I have ever see. Sent in request email through their web support. Never got reply. Don't even to mention no any explanation for the 3188 release. Mistakenly upgraded to it from 3186 couple days ago. Have to reinstall XP to get it to start up. What a wast of time (Once installed a new VM with Windows, now can get to the original VM). Old known bugs still there. Don't know what there are trying to do. Eager to see how Fusion will work and how their support might be.

 

I agree with you also. I'm working with Parallels one year now...
And for me that is the important reason, but I believe Parallels guys had become overloaded by the support and one good idea (the forums/beta versions) had become a VERY VERY BAD EXPERIENCE.
The management board of Parallels must react and do something previous to some people (I, for example) migrate to VMware.
In fact, I'm convinced to migrate to VMware, becouse I0m using its VMserver in my office, and if all VM can run in any machine, for me is better...

 

For me, it seems like they are consistently "falling behind themselves." Like when they were touting Boot Camp support finally being available, but it turned out that it was sort of a "halfway" solution because of all the activation issues. Then by the time they got that resolved, they are still behind the current desires/hype because you can't use Boot Camp+Vista+Parallels. I know Boot Camp doesn't officially support Vista yet, and frankly I would be happy if the Vista partition were not even actually bootable for now, as long as it worked in Parallels now and would work later under Leopard Boot Camp without additional activation issues.

 

There are things I love about the product--that it mostly works and I only have to use Windoze when I absolutely must. However, I have reported the same constant crashes in the virtual machine since version 1970, through all the betas, RC's, to 3186 and 3188. I have personally written to Tim Surgent and to Ben Rudolph about these continuing problems. There has not been one response to dozens of bug reports, forum posts, and personal notes. This is simply the worst version of being completely ignored by a company that I have experienced. I might switch just to avoid this kind of treatment.

PhilK

 

That's possible, but difficult - when I pay a company for a product, and don't get replies to e-mails about problems I'm having, I become disappointed with both the company and unable to recommend the product.

I think they should do a feature-freeze for a while, and begin fixing the problems prople are reporting on the forums. Otherwise they're soon going to be a company with a very fully featured product, in which only half the features work as expected.


First and foremost: get that bloody processor usage when idle down!

 

not a problem at all..weird?

i bought a macbook pro 60 days ago. I have been using parallels since and updating with every single release. With the first install 60 days ago my only issue was vista would get corrupted once in a while. since the last update that went away. I use Vista and win2003 enterprise with parallels on my mb pro with 3g ram. I have had no single error, or crash. all features are working expet for aero of course. i can copy files, coherence works great.

I'd like to mention I am an I.T. guy and I do depend on my notebook a lot. Now to amuse all of you...I work for Microsoft..shhhhhhhhhhh. yep using a mac.

 

I'm just trying to get a few things:
1.) How many people are really happy
2.) How many people are disappointed
3.) Get Parallels attention to the divided population and in an effort have them bring the disappointed population to the "really happy" side.
4.) Get a response from Parallels because frankly it seems they only respond when they feel like it and perhaps it will encourage them to have better technical support.

 

Personally i've only had q couple of problems with parallels and (thankfully by the sound of it) havnt usedly their support service.
Overall, its a great product, it has some issues but they are being resolved in due course. I'm pretty happy with it.

 

Also happy here. I wouldn't have shelled out the cash for it if I wasn't. I'm also IT and running a MBPro. I've only had it a few weeks. I have to have Windows for certain apps that my company runs. I haven't had any issues with Parallels at all. And when I'm at work, it's running all day long. I was primarily going to use Boot Camp, but after hearing about Parallels on a certain radio talk show, I checked it out. So far, so good. Hopefully with the success the company finds with this product, they can do better with support, but I have not yet had to use it, so I don't know how good/bad it is.

 

I am very pleased with the product.

I think many people here are jumping to conclusions about Parallels. No one seems to keep in mind that Parallels is a small company and Parallels Desktop for Mac is still an infant program trying to fill some very big shoes. For who they are, and what they've done... they have done an outstanding job so far.

I'm sympathetic with the absolute flood of messages and error reports, rants and hate mail they receive. I myself have recently finished school and now work in the software engineering world... Currently working on a multi-million dollar project for a many major financial institutions. We have to deal with similar floods of useless information coming in every day.

Do any of you realize, if you want to really pay attention to this sort of unorganized information flow that it takes real man hours to do so? We have to devote developers, HR people and testers... basically anyone available just to try and process the flood of information one of our current clients throws at us. The effect this has is not good, it slows down everything from actual coding, testing and the overall quality and quickness of our development.

I can't blame them for "ignoring" the community and actually getting to work. Especially since they supposedly released the "final" 2.x build and its still broken (funny, we just did the same thing with our project.)

That's what happens in this situation... Lay off them. In the end, it will be alright.

In retrospect, Parallels should consider the same type of solutions for the future that we are contemplating... namely, a good way to handle information (differentiate types of feedback, bugs [mandate specific information for bugs etc.]) It's hard to implement this in the middle of an existing project, but it would be nice to do for the future.

 

Parallels is owned by a very large company with a lot of virtualization experience. Many believe they are acting with complicity in this support problem, in fact.

 

Regardless, how familiar are you with what they are attempting to do? They want to appease the needs (or should I say desires) of the users on these forums. "Boot Camp" support? If anyone remembers, 1970 was a rock solid build. Coherence and boot camp integration have essentially killed their ability to keep a stable platform.

Now they are depending on the fragile system structure that is Boot Camp to be the same on everyones system. Then they are bridging together two file systems that generally do not cooperate well (especially if we are talking about NTFS...) When apple made 10.4.6 and the firmware updates came out, it essentially added "legacy" support to the regular EFI loader to emulate the existence of a BIOS when it is needed (i.e. to start Windows.) Previously, there was no way for EFI and MBR to coexist on a system, what Apple has done is created a new type of hybrid EFI/MBR boot sector. Windows doesn't know about EFI, and OS X could theoretically be booted by EFI or MBR. Of course its much more complicated then it sounds, and any modification to the fragile setup they have come up with will render anything but OS X un bootable. There are some cool projects our there (such as rEFIt, coming out of Debian) which acts as a replacement boot loader to the alt button OS X provides... customizable, and can "repair" a damanged EFI/MBR boot sector (I call it EFI/MBR but EFI uses a GPT table; it's really a GPT/MBR hybrid boot sector.)

Boot camp doesnt do anything magical as some may think, it simply lets you burn a windows CD and helps resize the HFS+ volume and puts a FAT32 or NTFS partition at the end of the drive (yes, Windows must be the last partition or this fragile setup wont work.) Since this is the case, you can just as easily create more partitions and install other operating systems (a Linux distro such as Ubuntu has pretty good hardware compatibility with most of the new intel mac hardware.)

All this said and done, they are depending on this being the same on all systems. Simply put, I personally think its a bad idea and would have never base core features of a large scale project on it.

I liked build 1970, and I will probably continue to use it until they have another truly stable release.

I say stop pestering them, they are still developing, and have A LOT of work to do to make this a stable project. I spend 1/3 my time at work sifting through email and useless bug reports (stupid user error is probably the case 90% of the time.) If myself, and all the other developers had that 1/3 of our day back every day... our project would have been on time and would have been better.

 

Also, being owned by a large parent company doesn't mean anything. Similarly our company was purchased by a worldwide financial software company many years ago, yet we still operate in a small independant office with ~ 5 local developers and (unfortunately) use a overseas team of 4-6. We are responsible for our products and support of our products... all the parent company really does is occasionally help find new clients, and pay us...

This may not be the case with Parallels, I don't know; but you can't just say GOOGLE OWNS THEM, THEY SHOULD BE GODS. Doesn't mean anything without knowing specifics...