steamthrowersaidthis

This app is h-o-r-r-i-b-l-e. Whether on Windows or on Mac, it crashes like a little old lady in a Cadilac who forgot to wear her glasses. Pitiful. These folks aren't quite, let us say, up to par.

As I use multimedia software daily, all I can say is "anti-booya".

lots of respect for the try to build an app that is FREE of charge, open source AND platform independent. that is a hell of a complex thing, but nevertheless

these guys are in desperate need of help!

Fantastic app! Used in Star Wars, Battlestar:Galactica, Stargate, and hundreds of other VFX productions. Highly recommend it.

Perhaps one day there will be a port to a native Mac interface at least partially interpretable to humans. But until then I'm using Lightwave as my primary 3D modeling, animation, and rendering app.

Blender's too darn complicated!

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.