matt_lewsaidthis

How it compares to what? Boot Camp?

What can I say, I can't live without it!

I was so excited about getting 3.0, but I get to the same spot in the installation every time and it freezes. It makes it all the way to installing devices and "WHAM!" it stops, never to move again. I wish I could figure out what's wrong, but the Parallels Desktop Bug Report never gets anyone to contact me and the Parallel Blogs show many people having the same problem.

I'm hoping that I can reverse my dissatisfaction soon.

I never realized how much Parallels was destroying my system. Even with 2GB of ram in my MacBook, I experienced >600k pageouts and RAM troubles constantly (with 312MB RAM devoted to my windows VM). Translation: constant disk activity and a slow machine. I thought this was just life in the world of virtualization until I tried VMWare Fusion 1.0. Ahhhhhhh.....so much better! I'll have to live without the (actually wonderful) parallels app-sharing for now.

Basically, if you're expecting to do anything related to multimedia or graphics, don't use it. As I use 3d animation in my workflow daily, I require a lot of power. Parallels is crap for that. If you need to use lightweight Windows programs, great, it'll work. But anything remotely data-intensive: forget it. And games? If it's been released since 2004 it probably doesn't work well. At all.

This was a bummer for me. $80 down the drain. Reviews had led me to belive that OpenGl worked well on it. Guess what. It doesn't.

Bought version 3 in the recent MUPromo bundle, and am kind of regretting my purchase. I had trialled it a few months ago, but didn't give it a proper shakedown in CPU/graphics-intensive applications, and the performance on my 2.2ghz macbook turns out to be quite poor for most of the things I'd actually want to do with it (games, graphics apps, file-processing utilities). Windows itself behaves sluggishly, using both recommended and maximum memory settings - even dragging an explorer window around has noticeable redraw lag.

There's also significant problems using non-US Macbook keyboards with it. Parallels represents the keyboard to windows as a standard 101-key windows keyboard - but the layout of special characters (e.g. \, |, ", {}) can be very different on the Macbook keyboard. There seems to be no way to tell Windows to use a more appropriate keyboard driver either, as the bootcamp drivers don't match the phony hardware that Parallels presents to the VM. So you'd better have a really good memory of where the special characters are on a full-size 101-key keyboard in your chosen language.

There's quite a few interface niggles too. Parallels can't seem to figure out whether it's a windows app or a mac app - there's egregious OK/Cancel buttons in every dialog, and they even swap positions from window to window. You can't view the configuration settings of a VM without suspending it - and then actually viewing them will automatically shut down the VM from suspend mode, even if you don't modify any settings. Parallels will also let you allocate more memory to a VM than the total memory allocation limit, then refuse to start the VM until you change the total memory limit too. Who wrote a warning dialog for that without it occuring to them to warn the user sooner or just take care of it automatically? Meanwhile, there's a preferences pane for what type of animation to use for full-screen transitions, and even what speed to play the animation at.
For a Mac-only app that's up to version 3, I expected these kind of obvious design errors to have been fixed - it feels like nobody read the HIG.

I also trialled VMWare Fusion a while ago and, while it shares much of the same UI clunkiness, the performance was better in Windows itself and the configuration interface was at least less obstructive. I am looking forward to parallels 4, which I hope will bring better performance and a more mac-like UI sensibility. If it doesn't, then VMWare for me.

Parallels performs well with Windows XP on my new Apple Air. I have tried Fusion but that was confuding for me to switch my windows machine to mac and the only solution was Transporter from Parallels. Also Parallels represent a great integration between OSX and Windows, so I really enjoy it.
As for VMware I can say that their performance on Vista is a bit higher but lack of compatibility and features for me sound bad.
So, I'd stay with Parallels.

Unfortunately, HL2 is one of the few games it can run well.

I tried using it, found the software very functional (It does run unsupported software - they just cant test and support ALL windows software obviously). Great for running pc software without having to partition your hard drive and install windows - definitely saves hard drive space!

I did really like the installer which helps install windows software on a virtual C:\ Drive. I would like to see the C:\ mounted or at least Aliased on the desktop though. The open/save file dialog can get complicated being that your C:\ is located in your user directory and your mac drives are also available to select from.

I will keep it installed just in case, but usually I can find suitable or better mac software for most purposes. I may even try other free or open source versions of wine for OS X instead of this commercial software.

Changes:
7.0.2 CrossOver Mac - July 7, 2008

* Bug fixes:
o Fixed a bug in 7.0 which prevented printing in upgraded installs.
o Fixed running of Office 2000 and Office XP on some 64-bit machines.
o Fixed a saving failure in some Word 2003 and Excel 2003 documents.
o Re-enabled use of the 'default bottle' on the Mac.

7.0.0 CrossOver Mac - June 17, 2008

* New application support:
o Office 2007 (Including Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and limited Outlook)
o Photoshop CS and CS2
* Bug fixes:
o Greatly improved online banking integration in Quicken 2007 and 2008
o Fixed service pack support for several versions of Office
o Improved IE support in win2000 and winxp bottles (though win98 is still better)
o Improved support for modern Linux distributions (especially Ubuntu)
o This build also includes countless wine fixes. Many small bugs should be fixed, and unsupported application behavior should be greatly improved.

I have 2GB. =P I don't think RAM is the problem.

They're not the same. The other one specifically says it's PPC optimised. This one says Intel.

IMHO, this is what Firefox for Mac should have beem from the beginning.
It has the look and feel of a real Mac application. The Aqua-look HTML elements are very well integrated. (Just like Camino.) And all Firefox themes and extensions work perfectly. I just wish there was a theme with an unified toolbar. (But maybe I'm just wishing too much...)
There are separate versions for PowerPC and Intel Macs, which are lighter (and faster!) than the official Universal Binary version of Firefox.
This is really great! Keep the good work.

This is such a winner!

@matt lew: plus the author said on his blog that he doesn't have time anymore the update the ppc version.

There is also a build made by Adam Michel which builds ppc and intel via
http://firefoxmac.furbism.com/
He also supports nightly builds.

I wouldn't say you are. It's a very suspicious situation atm I would say.

I think here's the changelog for the Beta4. It also reveals who the submitter of the beta fixes are.

http://virtuedesktops.info/index.php/2007/05/18/virtuedesktops-054-beta-4/

Mad propz to Florent Bruneau for contributing to the changes for beta 5:

http://virtuedesktops.info/index.php/2007/06/13/virtuedesktops-054-beta-5/

"Changes
* Fixes to localisation;
* Miscellaneous fixes for stability;"

VirtueDesktops is not being actively developed again, and Florent has certainly not made any promises to continue contributing - he's making fixes as he can. If you are a heavy user of VirtueDesktops, you should upgrade to the latest betas and see how you go - they are much stabler, and have much more consistent behaviour.

Mad props, indeed :)