Satisfied v.3 Upgrader

I upgraded from build 3188 to 3.0 and had no issues. Snapshot/undo support, the primary reason I upgraded, works great. Additionally I was pleased to see a bug in Coherence was fixed, sound no longer uses a ton of CPU, and I was able to run a DOS program which formerly crashed Parallels hard.

I decided to register and post to provide a little counterbalance to the hyperbolic accusations on this board that Parallels "does not work at all" and that the company is a bunch of "crooks" and "con-men". I've used Parallels for several months, and though I've encountered a few bugs, the Parallels team is good about addressing them. I was also quite surprised that Coherence was added as a free feature in the 2.x timeframe--that was worth paying for in and of itself.

I hope the Parallels team, read this thread and see there are satisfied customers out there, not just vitriol.

 

Hi there !

Add me to the list of happy customers too ! I'm a long time reader of this forum but I seldom post here.
3.0 brought several improvements (including running a faster FFXIBench (with some bugs but the number is "impressive")).
Another thing is that I can launch OSX Apps from Parallels ! That's great ! One Application both worlds !

@Parallels: Thanks for this product ! Keep up the good work !


About gaming: I don't want to rant or flame but hey guys, a little bit "conservative" thinking in software installtions would be no mistake:
1. Always make backups
2. Don't run from Bootcamp, use an image instead !
3. Don't forget what machine is running bellow the surface. I see postings about fps (successes and disappointments) and so on without writing about the mac and the vm (I suppose here the graphic-card of the host system DOES make a difference)
4. Comparision with VMWare Fusion is a bit unfair: VMWare (FFXIBench brought down the entire VM) isn't even released yet ! So a comparision with Bochs or VirtualBox seems fairer. I also predict, the same discussion will start again on the VMWare forum as soon as it's released ("Oh, why isn't XYZ not running ? Why does it have glitches ?"). And pricing is not released yet !

PS: I'm not in the beta-program but I think the way parallels does it is the correct way to do it (I'm also a software developer, so I know what's going on there...).

 

Me likey

I don't do much 3D gaming - I mostly play poker. But I do have a soft spot in my heart for BZFlag. Since it's an OpenGL game and open source, I can just run it natively, but I decided, just out of curiosity, to gave it a try under parallels. On my mac mini with all of the options turned up to max, hooked up to my 720p TV, I get 25 FPS. That's pretty darned impressive, I think!

 

On their (Paralells') ist of suported games there are 4 that are 3D. 4 out of like 20 games. There's a wonderful picture of Warcraft running in Paralells. They (the company) give EVERY impression that this software runs (like they said) "Most 3D games". When even the 4 they have listed are problematic. I mean, did they even bother testing the listed games?

Sure I can "run" Warcraft. It'll boot. And that's about it. LOL Of course, Warcraft has a great mac client so why would anyone even run it in Parelells? Well I did. To test their claims. I ran it on a Mac pro with 4gigs of RAM and a 256 XT1800 video card. Try it yourself.

It's vaporware. Most of you don't play games. But I believed the BS and upgraded for that one feature.

many others did too: http://forum.parallels.com/thread12428.html

 

fbronner-
What do you mean by "some glitches with multi-monitor support"? As soon as I receive XP Pro SP2 from Amazon, I plan to install Parallels on my new MBPro 2.2 GHz, and use its 15" monitor along with a Dell 24" LCD. Will I be able to use both monitors when using Parallels?

Thanks for any help/advice.

 

Yup happy camper here...

upgraded from 3186

love the new mapping of windows drives in finder

 

From another thread with like 6 pages. In case yawl don't want to wade through it all. Sums up the situation:

SolGrundy wrote:

" SWSoft gets a big F- for this release. Or at least, their marketing department does. I kept trying older and older games to see what would work, and here are the results, on a MacPro with 3GB memory and an ATI Radeon X1900 XT with 512MB VRAM:

Half-Life 2: Fail Screen doesn't completely update, unacceptable frame rate.
Civ 4 Warlords: Fail Eventually gets to main title screen, shows only the eyes and teeth of the animated character in the main menu, won't let me click on menu items.
Sam & Max Season One: Fail Section of screen cut off, frame rate too low to be playable.
The Longest Journey: Fail Section of screen cut off, no text displayed anywhere.
Fallout 2: Fail "Can't initialize input devices"
FreeCell: Fail Crashes only with Microsoft's standard error-reporting dialog box. That's right, FreeCell doesn't run.

I'm running Vista Premium. After testing all of these, I look in the release notes to see that Direct3D is only "supported" under XP, not Vista.

Listing Direct3D support as a major feature of version 3.0: Pass
Mentioning that Vista isn't supported BEFORE I pay money for the upgrade: Fail
Mentioning that it's XP-only ANYWHERE in the marketing text for version 3.0: Fail
Giving me a real list of features included in version 3.0 before charging me $40 for it and warning that time is going to run out if I don't act before buying: Fail
Making the list of compatible games available before release, or even mentioning that the game support is a small percentage of the games available: Fail
Advising people on the (not accessible from the main page) forums to try to circumvent other publishers' copy protection to get around compatibility issues: Double Plus Extra Fail

I'm confident they'll be able to fix the problems eventually, since the company's track record has to make significant improvements in the software very quickly. But this release was completely botched. And the marketing and support in particular have left a really bad taste in my mouth."

PS: Also posted as a warning to anyone thinking of gaming with Parallels (and buying it). And comes to this forums and see yawl's glowing reviews..

 

I may have been more clever than others, but when I read that it has 3D support, I never understood that all the games would work, but rather that it's the first version to have 3D support and that it'll be of course a limited support. What confirmed to me that is that they posted from the very first fay of announcement, a list of compatibility. If the support were not limited, there wouldn't need any list of compatibility, as everything would work.

So sorry for all those who misunderstood the indeed bad marketing of Parallels, but next time, think a bit more before believing a marketing argument. Marketing always lie, that's a lesson I learnt many years ago, and that's why I never read a marketing argument at first degree and always verify it before believing it or not.

Ao at least, this gave you all this little listen, and now you know the real value of marketing .

Otherwise, knowing that I didn't expected a good Direct X support (the OpenGL however seems quite good), that I don't play games very much, and that I didn't upgraded for the 3D support, I'm quite happy with this very, the very nice new features for MacOS X integration are quite cool, and finally I can hide the taskbar completely in coherence mode as now the start menu is available when clicking on the parallels icon in the dock.
The only little disappointement is that I expected that coherence would be a bit more updated, in fact I expected something like Unity for Coherence 2.0... But I'm sure the Parallels team won't let VMWare wins on this feature, as it's a Parallels innovation, they have to regain the leadership

 

Happy as well and have been for a while!

I don't do computer gaming... I have an Xbox 360 for that at home. Parallels for me is all about running MS office apps, Delphi compiler and testing code I write. Parallels has been solid for me for a long time. No complaints.

New features in 3.0 are nice. Snapshots, windows drive in finder, all great.

Well worth the $40 upgrade.

Mark

 

No problems here.

I was able to upgrade MSIE from 6 to 7 in XP. If you have a legit copy of XP you -have- to go thru the 'Genuine Advantage' dance.. or.. no dice.

I did so and have had no problems.. take a look:



Original photo here.

 

Well, I am satisfied with the upgrade overall, too. I like the new snapshot and smart select features and I am happy with the self mounting drive C: What I dont like is the fact virtual drives can not be expanded any more. Hopefully that comes back again in some time. The DirectX support does not work for my preferred games (MS Flight Sim and Tiger Wood PGA) but perhaps this may evolve in some time too. When the Aero features are working, I may even step up to Vista. Anyway, you did a good job here - please keep going!

 

Look, to tell you the truth I like this product. I am seriouslly pissed at the lack of decent 3D gaming support. That sort that was hyped,promised and marketed. Really pissed.

But Paralels is an excellent piece of software. It just need serious work. And the marketing/support department both needs some serious work.

I'm sure the progammers want Parallels to work. I'm sure they want to play a game like Civ4 (windows version) within Parallels. So I haven't lost faith in them. I actually think they'll fix it. Hopefully sooner rather then later. But we'll see.

But the company as a whole I've lost all my faith in. Never wil i believe a word they say or a thing they promise. And tha'ts really a shame.

 

Another Happy Customer

I'm very satisfied with Parallels. It was Parallels that convinced me to upgrade from a G4 to an Intel Mac. I thought 2.0 was great. I think 3.0 is even better. The new features are all great. Very happy with the purchase. Congratulations to the Parallels developers.

 

Seriously, you need to take a reality check. They didn't misrepresent the product; you just had unrealistic expectations. Anybody who knows anything about computers knows that 3D support in VM software is bleeding edge technology. This is a damn fine effort.

And what's with all these ultimatums on the forums? "Because I couldn't get into the closed beta I'm never going to buy Parallels and use Fusion instead". "Because I didn't get my $10 discount I'm going to bitch about it on the forums". "Because I had unrealistic expectations I'm going to hold my breath until I turn blue". It's really juvenille. This is an incredibly good product at an amazingly cheap price. If $49 is such an imposition on your budget, perhaps you should sell your Mac and get a Casio calculator.

 

Happy with 3.0

I'm pleased to be able to add my name to those who upgraded to 3.0 with absolutely no problems.

Downloaded the upgrade and applied it. Then started up my existing VMs - Windows 2000, Windows XP Pro, Ubuntu (Feisty) - and they all converted their drives and ran.

Performance in all cases is better than it was (for me) on 3188.

And I very much like the new features - espcially the "undo" function.

Well done team!

Jon

 

Apparently most people want full DX10 hardware support and their dishes to be done too.


I've thuroughly enjoyed the 3d support Parallels has brought. I've played through almost entirely, MOHAA, the game I most wanted to play.

Is it in the list? Nope. Does it play great? Sure does.

I'm enjoying 3.0.