I had two big complaints with Parallels that led me to consider dropping $80 on VMWare Fusion instead of, say, beer. First, it was incredibly slow and resource hungry, and I'd have to quit almost everything to run my Win32 virt. At the very least, I'd have to quit Firefox, which was really annoying. Secondly, the damned taskbar was never visible. Every time I booted, and more, I'd have to go to Start, Settings, Taskbar and hide, apply, show, apply. Augh!
After experiencing completely lovely performance under VMWare Fusion, I updated my Parallels virt to use the same amount of RAM. VMWare was using 512 MB, which it suggested was ideal. I had upped my Parallels machine to 768 or so, although I think it also claimed 512 was ideal. I lowered its memory usage to 512 and its performance increased by leaps and bounds. Wow!
Then I googled around for the stupid task bar problem and found out that it's a feature! Ugh! I went to the Parallels menu bar and took Applications, then Show Windows Taskbar. I guess it has something to do with the Coherence mode, where you only see Windows applications, and not the desktop. I never use that.
Anyway, now Parallels is totally usable, it seems. It's certainly not worth spending eighty bucks to replace.
Hi,
There have been some good reports recently about Sun's VirtualBox on OS X and it is free: http://www.virtualbox.org/
John.
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Re: virtualbox
rjbs on 2008-08-14T16:25:11
Everything I hear so far from our in-house Solaris admin, who loves Sun, is that virtualbox isn't quite ready yet. Also, Parallels and VMWare give you lots of hot features like drag and drop copy, simple file sharing, etc. I think bda told me that Virtualbox doesn't even do host-based network sharing yet, on Mac.
Re: virtualbox
Aristotle on 2008-08-16T14:53:13
I’ve been using Virtualbox on Linux for a while now. I have no complaints at all, it works very nicely and does everything I want it to. I’m not using it for much, though (mostly for IE-proofing web pages), and of course I have no idea how well the Mac version works as a Mac app.
Re:If the $80 is still burning a hole in your pock
rjbs on 2008-08-14T21:38:42
I'm maxed out.
I initially bought Parallels for $99 and it worked pretty well. Then a few weeks after that they released 3.0, and I happily clicked yes to upgrade. It upgraded my 2.x instance, then insisted I buy a new license key for 3.x. I wiped it and reinstalled 2.x.
Then when I upgraded to Leopard a few months later Parallels completely tanked. It would lock up the whole system when starting up for upwards of 10 minutes; I couldn't even open the activity monitor to kill the process. I don't know if others had this same issue, but I was thoroughly disgusted by the experience.
I reluctantly dropped $80 on Fusion, and haven't looked back. VMWare had a free converter that I downloaded and changed my Parallels images into VMWare images and they just worked. Maybe I'm being a VMWare fanboy and just had a bad experience with Parallels, but the VMWare experience has been so much better I had to reply
