For me, I was an avid Parallels user from the day it was released. Around version 3 I ran into a problem where it wouldn't run anything. It would just start and then crash back to the desktop. I tried everything even a clean wipe of my machine and it still did the same thing. They told me that there was a new version coming out and I should upgrade to that because it will fix the problem. It came out, I upgraded, it didn't fix the problem. At that point, they told me they had no idea and refused me any further support.
I switched to VMWare and have been happy with it.
Today I considered Parallels 8 because of the good deal via NewEgg. But their website leads me to believe that they won't give a free upgrade to 7 because it is an OEM edition. So I tried emailing them, calling them and online chatting with them about this. In all cases I was refused customer support because I didn't actively have a license with them. So in other words, they didn't want to help a potential customer answer a question. So screw them, no desire to buy it now.
Hmm I feel for you. I had a different experience though. When I got my Parallels Desktop 5 license, it was pretty close to the release of Parallels Desktop 6 and it was about 1-2 weeks earlier than the eligibility for the free upgrade to version 6. I emailed them about it and they actually did provide me with a free upgrade. Maybe you can try emailing them again? Or reach them via their twitter account?
Anyways, I too recently got hold of both VMware Fusion 5 and Parallels Desktop 8 to see which was the better one from the usability standpoint, not from some synthetic benchmark. I wrote them up here at my blog (
http://www.atpeaz.com/index.php/201...are-fusion-5-the-usability-comparison-report/) to avoid repeating myself everywhere.
It's a pretty long one on the features that one would find useful, but in summary:-
- Performance is pretty decent on both VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop 8. But startup time, suspending and resuming is still faster on Parallels.
- Parallels handled Windows 8 much better than Fusion
- If Win 7 is your target host, Parallels Desktop 7 and VMware Fusion 4 are good enough.
- If Win 8 is what you wanna run, Parallels Desktop 8 is the way to go.
- If Linux is your thing, VMware has better supportability for all the different distributions out there. Also, its likely you'd also want to meddle with the advanced (virtual) networking settings with VMware Fusion.