Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac Released

[AppleMatt]

Originally Posted by Slimemold

Signed up to this forum just to post this. Normally, I just lurk and read the page 1 and page 2 news, but this time, I feel that I have a duty as part of the consumer community to report my experiences with this miserable company.

I've been using Parallels from v1 to v4. The product in itself is actually okay...until something goes wrong (like, for example, when there's a new Linux distro release). Good luck getting them to even acknowledge the problem. It took months for the Parallels team to get Parallels 4 tools working with Ubuntu's hardy heron, for example. They wouldn't even acknowledge the issue on their user forums, and it was the biggest thread during this period.

Their user community forum is a joke. They routinely screen for negative comments...those posts just never show up on the forums. And they don't acknowledge problems for weeks or months, even as the community struggles to help each other out.

Absolutely correct. It was only after a protracted discussion with technical 'support' (who don't understand basic English) how bad I realised they were. Parallels 3 was excellent for me, but for whatever reason 4 just hated my computer. That in itself isn't an issue, but trying to get anything...at all...from them is. As you said, you can't even post your problem on new products to their own forums because they read (and delete it) before it even appears.

If anyone is considering this upgrade, I strongly recommend they search google for all the broken promises Parallels have made about features coming in free updates to previous upgrades, and then charging for them (or, indeed, any complaints about their service).

If that's the kind of company you want to purchase from, so be it.

AppleMatt