Why I'm getting a refund and switching back to Parallels

[junkshow]

I am so bummed. I was really excited about this release...what a letdown. None of the bugs (um...I mean "known issues") I reported was fixed. The performance is worse than beta 4 or RC1. To me, it feels like you had a release date, and you were going to hit it no matter what.

Right now, Parallels works better for me, which is incredibly disappointing. I don't like Parallels. I feel like it is a hack on the Windows side. But, I can get more done with it, because the Mac OS user interface isn't a half-baked beta that they decided to release anyway.

On the plus side, having competition seems to have gotten Parallels to step up their game AND I'm convinced that someday Fusion will be the best virtualization app for the Mac.

I just can't stomach paying for a beta quality solution.

[dp_fusion]

I was interested in reading of your failures with Fusion. My wife's computer (a Mac Mini) is running Fusion with QuickBooks Pro and an HP networked printer, and it all works great. There's too much in common here for it to be a Fusion problem so I wonder if there's something about your specific installation that is confusing things. You don't mention what you've tried at least in your current post but I do wonder what you've tried so far to get things going that haven't worked for you.

[wdeboer]

Hmm, it's odd the hear people experience that Fusion is less responsive then Parallels which is really slow for me and quite unstable while using VS.NET. Bluescreen "heaven".

[admin]

The OS X firewall won't protect the guest if you use bridged networking (I'm not sure if it does in NAT mode - NAT itself offers some protection, though). What about your setup doesn't work if the XP firewall is on?

[Eski]

Presume this is back at me.. yep, working in NAT mode. And yes, the Novell networking won't work if the XP firewall is on. I presume with Parallels that it is also a firewall/port type issue stopping me login to the Novell network in XP. I never got a response on the Parallels forum.

Finally, I have a paid for copy of Parallels v.1 and it does seem flaky compared to VMware Fusion. It def. hogs more system resources. Cheers.

[IPv6Freely]

--- Doesn't prevent a unity window being dragged off

the main display, just draws it incorrectly

This is the problem I'm having now, as you can see in the screenshot I'm attaching (a screenshot of my secondary display, with the Windows System Properties window dragged halfway over)

[Doobla]

Pat,

Thanks for posting the 30 day money back guarantee form. I'm going to have to use it soon if I don't get my 50% rebate which sales is giving me a hard time about. Quite frustrating.

Jon

[Pat_Lee]

Check your private messages.

Pat

[dropadrop]

I'll chime in for what it's worth...

I've used Parallels on my work notebook (MBP) since it was in beta, and still use it. I've used VmWare Fusion on my iMac C2D (at home) since it's first beta. My home computer has a way faster drive, also the processor is faster. Both have 2GB of memory.

For some reason my XP guest (created after installing 1.0) seems very sluggish comparing to the Win2k virtual I used during the whole beta / RC period. It's not so much a slowness of processing power, rather the gui (as mentioned before). To go even further I'd say what is really making it slow is disk operations. Any disk operation in the virtual especially if something is happening in the background with osx will clog things down. Something like opening the control panel might take 30s!

I have not bothered looking into it very much, for example I don't even know if I have IDE or SCSI disks for the virtual (not that it should make so much difference). Still it's weird... I did try removing and reinstalling vmware tools. Still, based on my short experience I would not be suprised if somebody finds the gui slower in fusion, and can't imagine how it would be with a notebooks slower hard drive.

I'm not switching to Parallels at home though. I'm planning on having Fusion installed for quite some while, and would not be suprised to see a patch sooner or later. I maintain Vmware GSX server, Server and ESX Server for a living and believe I have a fairly good idea on what their standards are... Also I don't think this is even close to the bugs Parallels had all the way till the 2.x releases. I think even 2.x was pretty far until they got their memory usage under control (but the last 2.x versions have worked very well).

edit: I guess I should add that the disk I created did not have space preallocated, something I have found to give pretty bad IO performance under both GSX Server and Server.

Message was edited by:

dropadrop