Initial Parallels 5 observations

It's much faster when guesting Windows. I had severe performance issues on my 8-core Mac Pro and Parallels 4 running Windows XP. It was borderline unusable especially with Visual Studio. Using the exact same XP and Vista VMs with Parallels 5, it feels snappier. Guesting Windows 7 works fine too. Of course now I can finally guest Leopard and Snow Leopard (Parallels 4 would always crash).

Here are some bugs though:

When guesting both Mac OS X Server 10.5 and 10.6, the bottom of the window tells me to install Parallels Tools even though I already have.

In Windows 7, I once lost Aero. I don't know how but when I tried to restore it from the appearance settings, it said something along the lines of it not being available or something disabling it. I had to reboot for it to come back.

In Mac OS X Server 10.5 (not sure yet if this is an issue with 10.6 because I haven't used it much), it often takes several attempts to enter my password to login. I know I'm typing it right because I don't have any issues anywhere else. Sometimes it takes a couple of tries... just now it took 4 tries. Also, even when the main VM window has the keyboard focus and the user name edit field has the keyboard focus, I still have to click on the edit field before keyboard presses are registered when logging in.

How do I get rid of the Shared Folder folder when guesting Mac OS X Server? I have Isolate Mac from Mac OS X checked yet the Shared Folder folder still appears after I reboot. I have to manually eject it to get rid of it each time.

I still can't install Parallels Tools in Fedora 11 (I use it to test my app against the shared libraries that Fedora 11 ships with.). No issues with Ubuntu.

PS, I'm a developer which is why I guest so many different platforms.

 

More bugs

Copy text from host then try to paste to guest Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6 does not work. Even though the bottom of the VM window says Parallels Tools not installed, it is installed. Why am I sure I did install it? Because the default resolution is 1024x768. You have to install PT to get more options for resolution (which I have it set to 1680x1050).

Sound does not work in guest Mac OS X.

Pressing tilde in guest Mac OS X, I get the character ± which is a pain if you use Terminal and try to cd to ~/Desktop. I have to type /Users/username/Desktop instead.

DNS server in Mac OS X 10.6 was set to 127.0.0.1 for some reason so I had to manually change it to the correct address.