What does everyone think?

I am a PC developer and I am just about to buy a Mac in a few day for the first time. My main purpose in buying the Mac Is to be able to use Windows with Parallels so I can work in both systems at once.

In looking at this forum, I'm getting the impression that Parallels is ineffectual and the tech support seems to be almost intentionally horrible. Does anyone at the company read these forums? But this could be because people don't usually post messages when things work.

I'd be interested in seeing success stories. Are there many people out there with Parallels working well? I saw a working version of it at the Apple store on an iMac with 1GB memory and it seemed to work well and very fast.

 

Well I wouldn't run it in anything with 1GB ...... it is really not as bad as the forums make it out to be. The current release was rushed out of beta for some reason (most likely VMware's beta update), but I use it daily and I've not not had the program crash. There are several issues to be resolved, but really I keep it running 24 hours a day without crashes.

 

I am running Parallels 2.5 (build 3188) on my Macbook with 2GB RAM. I uses 4 VMs (Windows 2000, Windows XP) and they work fine. My use is quite light, however. I have not tried the latest version of Parallels yet.

 

So is 2 GB enough to run Parallels well?

 

It is the least amount of RAM to consider. If your Mac has room for more memory you will be happier, and you can run multiple virtual machines without too much stress on the CPU's.

 

Firstly I'm certain you will love your Mac -welcome to the macworld. I am no techie but I love Parallels compared to virtual pc win 98 which was an apaulling experience. Parallels is very fast and I love the fast switching raher than rebooting. I wish Parallels would moderate this forum and respond to some of the issues though. I did a lot of research before purchasing it and it has one multiple awards . I would not buy it if you want to run games though. It is suiting me very well so far and my apps are working fine though most of my apps are on the mac side.

 

Oh well...

Boy, everyone here is so nice! In most forums if you ask questions you get a lot of rude answers (maybe Mac people are nice. I'm used to dealing with a lot of PC people).

I was really all set to buy a Mac, specifically to use parallels. It sounds like there are some people with Parallels running smoothly, but I just spent a couple hours browsing through this forum, and I can't believe how outrageously bad this software seems to be. Apple's big advertising campaign seems to center around how easy everything is to use and how knowlegable the people in the stores are. I found most of the people in the stores can't answer much beyond how much RAM is in a particular computer. Running Windows on Mac seems to be a nightmare (with Boot Camp or Parallels). I just read a sticky from the moderator here asking everyone to read the threads before posting, which is helpful, but people posting the same threads repeatedly should indicate how bug-ridden the software is. Instead of chewing everyone out, it would be nice if the moderators would step up and and fix some problems once in a while. I haven't even bought the software yet and I'm already mad at this company!

Anyway, I guess reading this forum has saved me a couple thousand dollars. After seeing how all this works, I'm just gonna stick to the PC. It ain't any better, but at least I know how to fix it.

 

Bug ridden? I must say, politely, that personally I do not agree with this assessment. I use Parallels on my Macbook to run Windows 2000 and XP and I have not yet encountered a problem. This is a support forum and therefore you are most likely to see problem threads.

If you visit a forum discussing PC uses I am sure you will find at least as many problems, if not more, being posted.

But of course if you have already decided to stick with your PC, I am sure you have made a correct decision at this time. Any time you want to try a Mac (and Parallels) you are always welcome to return. Good luck.

 

It would be foolish to base your opinion (to any extent) upon the sampling of nut cases who spend all their time posting messages to software support forums.

Parallels is offered as a free trial: try it and come to your own conclusions.

For my part, I've been quite happy with Parallels. The only thing it does not do for me is to properly make use of my Logitech USB headset (sound quality is poor for both mic and headphones). On the other hand, I've heard of others whose headsets work just fine. And my Magellan eXplorist, for which I must run Windows, works in all modes flawlessly.

 

This may be of interest: http://www.vmware.com/beta/fusion/index.html

 

Wow, again I can't believe how polite people are on here. This is very nice.

You are right that I can try the trial. My problem is this: both Parallels and Boot Camp seem to have a lot of major problems. If I buy a Mac, and can't get either to work properly, then I just bought a $2000 DVD player (for my purposes. I know Mac's do great things, but I still need to do a lot of PC stuff). The Apple store advertises Parallels but whenever I ask questions about it they are quick to respond that they don't support it and that is the end of the conversation. As I said above, I saw it wworking once, but no one could tell me anything about it. I noticed right away that the Windows guest couldn't see USB drives, but I found the solution to that by reading the instruction manual for Parallels (I guess using shared folders fixes the problem).

As for the nut cases who post problems on forums, sometimes I would say you are right, but there are a lot of well laid-out technical issues here, and the same ones seem to come up over and over.

I don't know, I'm really up in the air about it. I would love to be convinced that this will work.

 

Now hold on. "Nut Cases?" 3.0 was rush out the door. Many of the "features" do not work. Forget about "running many of todays hottest 3D games". That won't happen. What upset everyone so much was Parallels' marketing hype. Most of it were outright lies. And continue to be. They haven't changed it at all. And 3.0 stil doesn't run "todays hottest games", or "USB support" or "etc, etc, etc". But, do yourself a favor and download the trail and see for yourself.

What upset people more were fanboys (lke a few here) who kept defending the company. it's not all roses. So don't beleive them.

This company has horrible support. And users have been complaining about that since the product was released.

Bottom line: is parallels good? Yes. Will it do for you what the marketing hypes? No. Is there support? Maybe. Does it work? Depends.

Now flame on.

PS: if there's one thing this whole "upgrade" experience taught me, is don't take Parallels' or anyone else's word on anything [about this product]. Download the trail. If it does what you want, then you good. Simple.

Oh and don't switch to Mac cause of Parallels. Switch to mac cause you tired of all the BS windows puts you through. If you need to run Windows and if Parallels (or Fusion) can't do what you need dual boot. Windows runs VERY well as a dual boot on Intel Macs. (Dual Boot = Boot Camp).

 

I'm a developer who bought a Mac a few weeks ago for the same reasons... and am happy I did so.. Its nice to have a "real" machine that has unix underneath the user friendly hood.. Most places offer some sort of return policy so you could always return it (potentially minus a restocking fee if you aren't careful to check for that before you buy).
I figured that worst case Bootcamp was safe to bet on re: either that it would work now or soon and at least I could boot either one (or boot my old PC)... and Bootcamp worked fine for me with Vista.

Now with the newest parallels release I've got the ideal setup working..a windows task bar at the bottom of one of my monitors.. and the Mac's dock on another..

I admit to worrying a bit when I encountered glitches getting Parallels to work.. but I was pushing the envelope using Vista and with the version 3 release using Parallels with the Bootcamp installation..and it seems to work just fine for me now after the lastest release (posted in the forum but not on their main download link yet). The glitches I encountered were mostly getting it configured and tools installed so it would complete the boot.. but after that it works great so I suspect the core code is solid.



I think getting away from the level of bugs/annoyances running MS Windows on a PC made it worth some initial hassles getting things setup on the Mac. Now if some program misbehaves and screws up windows requiring a reboot.. (or hassle waiting for something chewing up all the CPU) I can be working on the Mac while it does so since it only hands the virtual machine 1 CPU to work with I hadn't tried it.. but it could even speed up working with Vista by keeping another windows VM around so one is always functional while waiting for the other to reboot or get to where you can kill the misbehaving program thats hogging CPU..



Judging from the lack of glitches once its properly configured to run and boot (and using the versions that actually support Vista now ) I'm suspect the situation is that the company likely has a core group of good engineers getting the main virtualization core working well and seems safe to use once its booted.. However it appears is being let down by the rest of the team (eg, their highest support priority should be answering concerns on these msg forums since a posting here helps multiple people vs. a reply to a single email may only be helping more than one.. Both need to be done, but the point is if if you are too swamped to handle everything well then the public forum should take priority since it likely will cut down on the number of individual emails received... Additionally adding issues to a public FAQ file helps more people than the same reply in 1 individual email..)

. Likely perhaps the core team testing with their own internal configurations of virtual machine settings and perhaps letting some less skilled folks handle develoing some of the easier code re: eg the user interface to create the configuration, etc.. gui types.. and then poor QA folks not testing enough options and poor documentation and support staff.

eg, there is no documentation in the main docs on how to handle having multiple disks wth Bootcamp partitions (it doesn't know which one to use unless you edit the configuration file manually).. even though the information is findable from a search of the forums.


I suspect it partly depends what sort of tasks you are doing and what sofr of machine you are looking at buying. Ok, I'll admit I doubt I may not have done it for an 1 Gig iMac like you mentioned watching demo Parallels (though you didn't say that was the model mac you were looking at.. just that it ran a demo).. I was lucky enough to be in a position to upgrade to a decent machine and was lured in and by the call of an 8 core Mac Pro and adding 8 gig RAM.. (nice to have a machine use 10% CPU when doing things my old windows box might have been grabbing 100% for.. and its only a year old dual core) Also I'm doing platform independent code at the moment and have less need for ms-windows specific stuff at the moment and may be able to make use of the extra cores and ram.

I suspect its a small company overwhelmed by the demand to have the product quickly and a large customer base all at once before the company and software had time to shake out some of the bugs that often arise when you release even well tested software out to lots of folks whose software and hardware environments are going to vary more than you could test for in the lab... and btw I note that many of the comments in this forum overall were about beta software (or new features of released software still in beta).

eg, at least for me once I got parallels to work in windowed mode.. allowing me to resize the window, etc, it worked just fine in that mode.. but it wouldn't enter coherence mode.. At least in my case what was needed was an undocumented step (hadn't searched the forums to see if others ran into this) where I had to set a custom display mode for vista matching the resolution of the monitor it was running on. That isn't documented anywhere stilll, and there are still minor workarounds to get it initially functional. eg it inexplicably complained about not being able to allocate virtual memory and wouldn't start the guest OS (regardless of whether I checked the box to tell it to preallocate).. when I've got 9 gig of RAM in my mac and lots of disk space. I had to lower the video card memory from 64MB down to like 16MB... but then after it booted for the first time was able to switch it back up to 64MB and have it work fine from then on.. (though I also needed to lower the main memory allocated to the virtual OS from the high of 1500MB down to 1400MB (actually I think it can be a bit higher than that but hadn't played with it.. I think its likely they are making it a maximum of 1500MB total memory including video memory and a little extra.. but it doesn't document this anyplace and the interface shouldn't let you configure things that won't work);.

There was also a glitch before the most recent version at times getting it to initially read the Boot Camp drive I figured was a Vista thing... (though I discovered if it complains it can't read the drive and the VM stops.. I tell it one more time to start and this time it will.. .again a startup issue.. once it starts its great..).


I also panicked when I came to these forums and saw some of the msgs wondering if I'd been a bit tooo premature.. but now that its working I do have the impression its like most software which most people use just fine and yet a minority who do have problems will be vocal on forums posting about it... In many cases the posters are people who have tried to push the envelope doing things like running Vista, etc.

The one glitch left I can't get to work is something I can get along with out. I suspect I'll need to wait on a fixed update from Parallels.. is that coherence only works for me in single monitor mode still (for me thats fine since I don't need windows that much, it is a 20" monitor and I can always move it over to 24" one if I need more.. if I ever feel like I need all 3 monitors for Vista I'm likely focused enough on it that I can boot into Bootcamp instead for a bit..) I'm hoping they'll get this fixed soon though so I just put windows from whichever anyplace on any monitor. (it sounds like it works for people with only two screens.. with the third screen given their size the fake display it tells Vista about is apparently too big for it to handle (though I'm not sure why.. with 64MB of video memory configured.. but the combined width of all the monitors is 5200 pixels (by 1050 or 1200 high).

 

Oops.. sorry for unproofed longer msg.. up too late.. If my mind were more awake at the moment I'd have been working though and not posted anything..

 

Hmm, I'm just peachy with USB support here. I can connect my cellphone to sync, update firmware, etc. through Parallels. USB drives work, too.

That, and 3D support is currently barely playable for the games I want to run.

There's some weird ActiveX controls that always crashes Parallels (and VirtualPC) but I managed to work around them.

Coherence works okay. VMware seems to have gotten ahead on Parallels' own game at the moment (works with Expose!) but it's not a deal breaker...

I have Parallels running in the background all the time. It's pretty reliable for what I need.

 

I bought my macbook pro 12 months ago and have been using Parallels for 6 months. I use a mapping program in Win xp and have had no problems at all hooking up my GPS. I use it generaly in Coherencs mode and to be quite honest you sometimes forget that you actually have 2 operating systems running . I also use Microsoft Office within Parallels and have no problems updating my contacts and to do list in Outlook from my mobile.

 

I'm a developer too... the Mac is a developer's dream machine... Parallels is fine for Windows development too (at least, I've not had any problems with it so far) - my gripes with Parallels stem from the recent upgrade fiasco - from a technical/developer's viewpoint I'm very happy indeed with Parallels.

 

I'm a Windows developer and I've been very happily running XP under Parallels (2.5) for many months. I have a Mac mini w/2 GB. 2 GB is plenty of RAM, but 1 GB won't be nearly enough. I give XP 1 GB. I've also disabled most of the visual performance-robbing glitz on both XP and OS X, since that's not so important to me. Performance on both sides is crisp.

I can't yet speak to 3.0. I'm looking forward to upgrading soon, but I'm proceeding slowly because there have been so many changes and I make my living working in my VM. I disable the things I don't use (USB support, sound, Coherence) and have Parallels down to 7% CPU at idle. If and when I go to 3.0, I'll disable 3D, too (just for that VM. I'd probably play w/3D, etc. in a noncritical VM).

I've never had any problems with Parallels, whatsoever. As a dev, you're a lot more technical than the average user. You probably won't see many (if any) of the problems that people are yelling the loudest about.

And yes, this is one of the most friendly forums I've ever seen. Prior to the 3.0 release it was a great place to share ideas and get help with problems. I hope all the negativity dies down soon so that we can get back on track. Until then, it's probably best to just ignore the trolls and definitely don't feed them. ;-)

 

Although you seem to be aware of the shortcomings of message boards like this one for providing good information on product reliability (as you say, the people having zero problems tend not to post anything at all), you still seem to be basing your assessment on message boards like this one. If you were to visit MacFixit.com and read that for a few days, you might be convinced that Macs are the most troublesome beasts in the technological world. If anything, however, the opposite is true.

 

I actually didn't have you in mind in particular, and in any event "nut case" is perhaps not the right term. Nut cases aside, your issues with the upgrade appear to stem from the fact that you failed to read the update notes that included a list of supported games. Indeed, many of the "problems" that generate most of the complaints on this board have come from people who simply do not read directions. This has been true since the first public beta. On the other hand, the Parallels team should certainly have been more up front with the limitations of 3D in version 3. By simply saying you can run "the most popular" 3D games, they left themselves wide open to the wrath of a lot of discontented, too-hopeful customers.