I'm in the same situation as you. I've found Parallels 5 to be quite laggy so am interested to try VMW for $10 rather than fork out $50 for probably a not so imrpoved version of Parallels 6
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Parallels Desktop 6 Now Available With Remote Access for iOS Devices, VMware Offers Discount
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I'm in the same situation as you. I've found Parallels 5 to be quite laggy so am interested to try VMW for $10 rather than fork out $50 for probably a not so imrpoved version of Parallels 6
I had a similar problem
It took hours for the tools to install and at some stage I got the dreaded microsoft blue screen. I rebooted the apple machine and after about three hours Win 7 began to function correctly.
I must admit that I have not seen any improvement in performance to-date.
It took hours for the tools to install and at some stage I got the dreaded microsoft blue screen. I rebooted the apple machine and after about three hours Win 7 began to function correctly.
I must admit that I have not seen any improvement in performance to-date.
VMware
I have both and while I suspect that VMware is actually better than Parallels I actually prefer Parallels. At $10 you should try VMware but I have never successfully migrated from one to the other ... there has always been some problem which prevented the migration.
I have both and while I suspect that VMware is actually better than Parallels I actually prefer Parallels. At $10 you should try VMware but I have never successfully migrated from one to the other ... there has always been some problem which prevented the migration.
No more support for Win98SE
I had a win98 vm that used to work on Parallels 5 but on version 6, a dialog pops up that says win98 is no longer supported. I wish they had mentioned that feature before I "upgraded" - Hey parallels, guess what- Some of use your product because of legacy systems!
I had a win98 vm that used to work on Parallels 5 but on version 6, a dialog pops up that says win98 is no longer supported. I wish they had mentioned that feature before I "upgraded" - Hey parallels, guess what- Some of use your product because of legacy systems!
I work in a Win7 VM all day every day. I tried Parallels, virtual box, and VMWare. Virtual box crashed a couple of times so it was eliminated from the running. Parallels ran okay, but it seemed aimed more towards home use with games and it to crashed once or twice. VMWare has been solid for months so that's what I've used. Keep mind my criteria may not be the same as everyone else's:
stability > speed > features
stability > speed > features
Thanks for posting it rKunda, its good info to know the deal did exist at some point even if it did change, The deal could come back. Ignore all the jealous negative types who love to shoot down anyone, for anything. The rest of us appreciate the posts.
I have been happy with Fusion 3. I am not a gamer but use Fusion mostly for development and testing. I run a mix of SLES, Ubuntu, OpenSuse, and XP VM's.
Getting Fusion 3 for $10 sounds like a steal.
Check Antivirus Software
I had a similar experience. A Parallels tech finally figured it out: I had not one but two copies of antivirus software running. The extra copy was left over from a VMWare install. My blunder aside, I would suggest that you disable any antivirus software running on the VM before running the tool installer and see if it helps.
I had a similar experience. A Parallels tech finally figured it out: I had not one but two copies of antivirus software running. The extra copy was left over from a VMWare install. My blunder aside, I would suggest that you disable any antivirus software running on the VM before running the tool installer and see if it helps.
Hm... can anyone tell me what sense it makes to access a Windows VM with an iPad? I am always excited about things that improve the way I work, but this does not make any sense to me, except that it has a certain toy factor, which will be worn of within minutes...
Anybody?
groovebuster
Anybody have thoughts on running IE, which solution would be best? Pretty much just looking at IE, for legacy websites, no other Win apps. This would also be an all-day, every day, business application, not messing around at home. I have Parallels 5 at home, no real reason to upgrade that for my home needs.
I want to access our Win server from an iPad, and am mostly decided on iTap RDP for that purpose. I'm not sure that Parallels Mobile would be an improvement over a normal RDP setup.
I've also been very happy with fusion 3. I have a copy through grad school and have no complaints so far- i've been using it regularly since may. I have created multiple VM's including win7, XP, Ubuntu and Backtrack 4.
Parallels experience
I have a Mac Pro (2x3GHz Xeon processors, 4GB 800MHz memory), and Parallels regularly takes 20-30 minutes to start and boot Windows 7, and then runs so slowly a lot of the time that it's completely unusable. I did manage to improve things by disabling all of the sharing of folders, desktop etc, but it's still seriously slow. I previously tried Fusion, but had some issues with it too. On my MacBook, fusion worked acceptably, but I still had issues with Parallels.
But one thing that really makes me want to give Parallels another shot is that they have excellent customer support. They spent a *lot* of time working through issues with me in the previous version to get it running, and have been really good to deal with. I have tried to use the Fusion support, and it sucks big time. Feels like a huge corporation who just don't care at all. I also visited the Fusion stand at a show in London, and asked some questions, and they tried to just avoid the questions and give some marketing bs saying it was wonderful and they were sure it would do whatever I wanted. Very not happy...
The only thing that is holding me back from upgrading to Parallels 6 is the upgrade price (and confirming that it fixes the performance issues). My expectation for software is that upgrade prices should be somewhere about 25-30% of the original purchase price. $50 for the upgrade of a product that retails for $80 just seems ridiculous.
Fusion's $10 offer sounds appealing, but my experience with their support was so bad that I just *never* want to do business with them again, period.
I have a Mac Pro (2x3GHz Xeon processors, 4GB 800MHz memory), and Parallels regularly takes 20-30 minutes to start and boot Windows 7, and then runs so slowly a lot of the time that it's completely unusable. I did manage to improve things by disabling all of the sharing of folders, desktop etc, but it's still seriously slow. I previously tried Fusion, but had some issues with it too. On my MacBook, fusion worked acceptably, but I still had issues with Parallels.
But one thing that really makes me want to give Parallels another shot is that they have excellent customer support. They spent a *lot* of time working through issues with me in the previous version to get it running, and have been really good to deal with. I have tried to use the Fusion support, and it sucks big time. Feels like a huge corporation who just don't care at all. I also visited the Fusion stand at a show in London, and asked some questions, and they tried to just avoid the questions and give some marketing bs saying it was wonderful and they were sure it would do whatever I wanted. Very not happy...
The only thing that is holding me back from upgrading to Parallels 6 is the upgrade price (and confirming that it fixes the performance issues). My expectation for software is that upgrade prices should be somewhere about 25-30% of the original purchase price. $50 for the upgrade of a product that retails for $80 just seems ridiculous.
Fusion's $10 offer sounds appealing, but my experience with their support was so bad that I just *never* want to do business with them again, period.
Especially when that product can almost always be found for much less than the $80 retail price.
If you have a previous version of Parallels or Fusion and you buy Parallels 5 you qualify for an additional $20 competitive rebate which will also make Parallels 6 only $10.
I had Parallels 5 and recently installed Parallels 6 over it.
I am using it in lieu of Bootcamp for almost all my Windows needs. The primary reason I started using it was for VPN at work and running iSeries Access (think green screen and gui access to a mid range computer - how something with 32 processors is mid range I will never know). After my company moved to a more neutral VPN provider, meaning it had Mac support, my needs for Bootcamp/Parallels is simply for gaming.
Currently I am running Lord of the Rings Online through Parallels. I did try it through Bootcamp and it ran exactly one time before blue screening any other attempt to run it. Here is the odd thing, it does not blue screen when run under Parallels. I run the game at 1900x1200 with most settings at high, the size of game items at 2560x1440 is just too small.
I use a first generation i5 iMac with 8gb of memory. I dedicate 3 processors and 4gb of memory to run XP/SP3 while using LOTRO. If I could dedicate fractional parts of the processing power I would bump it up. Going between full screen Windows and back to the iMac is as simple as moving the mouse to the top left corner of the screen. If Windows is in full screen and an application locks pressing CTRL and ALT has always freed the mouse and keyboard allowing me dump the VM.
I plan on running CIV5 next through Parallels. Being able to pop a window with Windows in it makes for an easy way to have a "second machine" without having the second machine. That applications running with in this window think they are full screen when they are not is even better. As in, I can run LOTRO full screen within a window on my OS X desktop.
I didn't have upgrade problems from v5 to v6. I had some initial install hiccups when doing v5 but that was most likely me not reading instructions well enough.
I am using it in lieu of Bootcamp for almost all my Windows needs. The primary reason I started using it was for VPN at work and running iSeries Access (think green screen and gui access to a mid range computer - how something with 32 processors is mid range I will never know). After my company moved to a more neutral VPN provider, meaning it had Mac support, my needs for Bootcamp/Parallels is simply for gaming.
Currently I am running Lord of the Rings Online through Parallels. I did try it through Bootcamp and it ran exactly one time before blue screening any other attempt to run it. Here is the odd thing, it does not blue screen when run under Parallels. I run the game at 1900x1200 with most settings at high, the size of game items at 2560x1440 is just too small.
I use a first generation i5 iMac with 8gb of memory. I dedicate 3 processors and 4gb of memory to run XP/SP3 while using LOTRO. If I could dedicate fractional parts of the processing power I would bump it up. Going between full screen Windows and back to the iMac is as simple as moving the mouse to the top left corner of the screen. If Windows is in full screen and an application locks pressing CTRL and ALT has always freed the mouse and keyboard allowing me dump the VM.
I plan on running CIV5 next through Parallels. Being able to pop a window with Windows in it makes for an easy way to have a "second machine" without having the second machine. That applications running with in this window think they are full screen when they are not is even better. As in, I can run LOTRO full screen within a window on my OS X desktop.
I didn't have upgrade problems from v5 to v6. I had some initial install hiccups when doing v5 but that was most likely me not reading instructions well enough.
Fusion is too slow
I had to switch from VMWare to Parallels because Windows was very sluggish on VMWare ... to the point where the mouse pointer was jerky and when I launched more than one VM forget it! Oh any my specs? Late 2008 MacPro - dual 2.8 Quad core Xeons, 24 gigs of ram and over 10TB of storage all together with my osx boot volume AND THE VM existing on a SSD drive. The system was no slouch and I had my VM optimized to the nth degree with VMWares help even to no avail.
I switched from Fusion 3 to Parallels 5 and migrated that very same VM (Windows 7 x64 dedicated 8 gigs RAM, 20 gigs free out of a 60 gig virtual HD and max video resources to it) into Parallels and it runs like a dream (not a re-install, but a simple conversion from Fusion into Parallels, I wanted to see what Parallels would do with the exact same install)! I upgraded to 6 and it now boots and shuts down in around 10 seconds and apps pop like nobody's business.
I should mention that my buddy has a 27" iMac with a core i7 and he has no problems with performance with Fusion and Windows 7 x64 (he has 16 gigs of ram in his iMac) ... so it could be something with the MacPro ... who knows.
I would spend the $9 on Fusion just to have it for comparison, but I will never use Fusion in production on a mac ever again unless they have a major come to Jesus meeting over there and get their spaghetti code fixed!
Mike
I had to switch from VMWare to Parallels because Windows was very sluggish on VMWare ... to the point where the mouse pointer was jerky and when I launched more than one VM forget it! Oh any my specs? Late 2008 MacPro - dual 2.8 Quad core Xeons, 24 gigs of ram and over 10TB of storage all together with my osx boot volume AND THE VM existing on a SSD drive. The system was no slouch and I had my VM optimized to the nth degree with VMWares help even to no avail.
I switched from Fusion 3 to Parallels 5 and migrated that very same VM (Windows 7 x64 dedicated 8 gigs RAM, 20 gigs free out of a 60 gig virtual HD and max video resources to it) into Parallels and it runs like a dream (not a re-install, but a simple conversion from Fusion into Parallels, I wanted to see what Parallels would do with the exact same install)! I upgraded to 6 and it now boots and shuts down in around 10 seconds and apps pop like nobody's business.
I should mention that my buddy has a 27" iMac with a core i7 and he has no problems with performance with Fusion and Windows 7 x64 (he has 16 gigs of ram in his iMac) ... so it could be something with the MacPro ... who knows.
I would spend the $9 on Fusion just to have it for comparison, but I will never use Fusion in production on a mac ever again unless they have a major come to Jesus meeting over there and get their spaghetti code fixed!
Mike
I use LogMeIn Free for this (I can hit my mac or my vm and there are reasons for each) and it works like a champ!
Mike
I would have paid the full $80 for the upgrade. My Parallels machine went from roughly 30 second boot times down to 10 and my apps pop like they never have before.
Why not get the trial and see if it works for you? If it does, shell out the $50 and be a happy camper!
Mike