Post Your Opinions of Parralels (Come on in!)

[OSXtasy]

Hi all, just wanted to discuss parallels a bit and see if anyone has any killer apps they are able to run inside of this great virtual machine software. So far i have a WinXP VM, and a Suse 10.o VM. I'm looking for some good stories or apps especially on the winxp side (mostly games not requiring 3d of course). I've tried Diablo 2 and although it installed, it would not launch. I plan on installing Fallout 1 and 2 tonight, and maybe starcraft. Anyone else tried anything??? Also I'm running MBP 2ghz/2gig ram/100gigHD, 15.4inch, blah, blah, blah......

[munky]

I dont really want to use parallels until it can boot a BootCamp partition.

[OSXtasy]

Yeah, that would rock, especially if you could get native control of the video card, and be able to load the drivers to support 3d. Unfortunately, i guarantee that will NEVER happen, as its just not conducive to what parallels was made for.

[jkwuc89]

I am a long time Windows user who is very close to switching out my Gateway notebook for a MacBook Pro (I am (im)patiently waiting for the MBP Merom update).

 

To prep for this, I borrowed a MacBook Pro 17 with 2GB of memory for a week to put it through its paces before deciding on buying one. During my trial run, I installed Parallels and created a Windows XP Pro VM inside of it that uses 768 MB of RAM. I installed several apps inside the VM including but not limited to:

 

XAMPP (Apache, PHP, MySQL package)

MS Visual C# Express

MS Money 2006

MS OneNote

Firefox

SlickEdit

NOD32 anti-virus

Cisco VPN client

 

I also configured the MBP to use Virtue Desktop to allow for full screen OS switching. After one week, I can honestly say that the VM was outperforming my current Gateway notebook which has a 1.6 GHz Centrino with 1 MB of RAM. There was only one Windows app that would not run (it's a console based football stats package that does something "weird" with the keyboard that cause this app to freeze inside a VM).

 

To say I was impressed with Parallels and the VM performance is an understatement. My qualms about not being able to run some Windows stuff on a MBP are gone. Regarding the football stats package I mention above, I'll probably create a Bootcamp partition to run this.

[jackt283]

I've been using Parallels for a few lousy minutes here, and I'm already experiencing problems with it. Using some pretty basic sound creation software I was experiencing serious stuttering issues when playing low resonent sounds (pumping bass is an absolute don't do).

 

I can see three ways to it:

Parrallels audio driver is messed up and it can't communicate effectivley with the OS X audio driver.

Perhaps a setting needs to be altered within it's poorly designed, difficult to use graphical interface.

Parrallels has terrible support for any hardware manipulation within your computer, hence making it

a severly sub standard solution for using Windows on your Mac, or Windows on your Vanilla Mac.

Parrallels is a ridiculous idea of an application and why is Apple supposedly supporting it?

When will we see Apple supporting a complete and full virtualization solution?

 

(This directed to the makers of Parrallels Workstation Mac OSx86): Make it public again and stop charging for it!! Let the people use it, so they can test it for you, for free. It'll create a better product that you will be indeed entitled to charge money for later on. Who knows it might even make you famous.

 

Serious need for improvement here. Note the demand for a program just like this that is Easy To Use, and as reliable as heaven and hell. Rock Solid.