refund for usb problems

iFor those of you interested you can email sales at parallels and they will refund your purchase price because of the usb problems and their misrepresentations in the sales literature.

 

Does this mean they've given up on improving usb support? Is this all the usb functionality we'll be getting?

 

I hope not. Apple is seeing 61% YoY notebook sales jump last quarter, so the customer base is growing. There is a lot more money for them to make if they continue to expand the support to at least the mainstream usb and bluetooth devices.

They have done a great job and have gone this far, there is no reason for them not to do it.

 

well it would have been easier to say, we will have usb support soon rather than offer to give a refund.

 

Thats too bad, and unfortunate and would not have expected this response from them.

 

When the GA was released many of the Parallels' team member posts implied that improved USB support was immenent... days away even. It's been a long time and the Parallel's team seem to have more or less abandoned the forums and certainly haven't mentioned anything about improved USB in a very long time.

I am very disappointed. It seems the current, problematic USB is all Parallel's is going to offer.

 

Well I hope better USB support is forth coming as well. But this won't stop me from using Parallels. It is still just perfect for me.

On a geneal rant... I have always disliked USB. I figure it has it's place namely for things like camera, disks, keychain drives etc.

But so many manufacturers have jumped on the USB bandwagon thinking it was the way to go when their product was far better suited as a network device. Case in point: I used to do amateur astro photography. CCD camera need to be mounted on a scope and then left open for long periods of time to capture enough light to overcome the noise issue.

This setup was ideal for a network. IE you run a simple 10-baseT net cable out to your scope/camera and sit in the comfort of your tent a fair distance away while you snap images.

But most of the astro camera makers decided USB was the way to go even though the cable length limit was 15' without an extender. The extenders were expensive and required power on both sides to work.

Had these folks put their cameras on ethernet I could have controlled all this gear completely wirelessly with a cheap linksys router.

So frankly I'm no fan of USB. The attempt to make so many things "Plug-and-Play" has made things extremely complex. Plus most development languages sold today do not offer straight off USB support. Typically you have to purchase a special library/driver set to get a USB device working. All languages I've had contact with allow direct access to your net port.

USB is overrated. While I know this doesn't help those of you that need to make a certain USB device work in Parallels, I just think some of the issues Parallels is having are due to the extreme complexity of USB and Plug-and-play. I have ethernet stuff/devices working perfectly in Parallels. Just my thoughts...

M

 

I have quiet similar feelings.. Before the so-called final revision, it was upgrading constantly, and responsive more much than it is now. It behaves not any expectation for a trustable company.

 

Guys,

We are working on minor product update with many fixes included USB fixes and we are working on next feature full major version as well. All your concerns and wishes are being discussed by our team and will affect feature set and design of our next major version.

 

That my friends is good enough for me!

Thanks Andrew!

 

Major Version..

So what does "Major Version" Mean?

1.5? 2.0?

Will we have to pay for an upgrade?

I am really dissapointed at the USB support as well but I really do like Parallel's Desktop. I hope we get the "Major Version" as part of our early adopter status..

 

Give 'em some credit

Although I have only been a registered user of this forum for a short time, I have been reading the boards for a while...IMHO, I do not think that Parallels is "giving up" on USB support by making refunds available to customers who are unhappy with their purchase because of the USB issues. Rather, I think they are standing behind their product and working to keep customers happy.

I knew when I purchased the first release of this product there would be issues (the first release of any product has issues). I think the Parallels team deserves some credit for standing by their product and also working to resolve the USB limitations with the product.

 

I have found a possible culprit to the problems I have with a USB gps. If I install the USB-to-serial driver comes with the gps on OS X, parallels can never get hold of it. But once I uninstall it and then reboot OS X, parallels is able to use it.
If there is a utility to unmount/unlock the usb-to-serial devices on OS X, then those devices might all be usable on parallels again.

The reason we want to use parallels is we don't want to use bootcamp and reboot every time. So uninstalling the driver and reboot to use it on parallels is not desirable.

 

Well, I've never installed a USB-to-serial driver on my VM because my GPS (Garmin Vista C) is a genuine USB device, and the instant I plug in a USB device I get Parallel's dreaded "device in use by another application" message.

 

The device in use message could still be caused by some native OSX process detecting the device upon plug-in and grabbing the GPS before parallels can.

 

The problem is that everyone trying to use certain USB devices has this problem (search this forum and you'll see that I have plenty of company) but even if in fact this is the real problem neither Parallels nor OS X documentation gives any clue as to (1) how to identify the offending process and (2) tell it to defer to Parallels Desktop.

 

I CERTAINLY hope that early adopters of Parallels wiill NOT be paying for the upgrade. USB does NOT work with Garmin Forerunner right now and that's too bad.n

 

.
Initial purchase is pay for. Minor, ?.x upgrades are free. Major, X.0 upgrades are pay for.
.

 

Constant is correct. Current virtualization engine has version 2.2 (2.1 for Win/Lin products). All updates in this line will be free of charge. Next generation engine 3.0 is under development and products based on it most likely will have some kind of upgrade fee.

 

Unfortunately, all the programs I use require USB support. If this feature is not coming, the Bootcamp is the only solution.

glor