Or you could subscribe to the thread and wait for an email...
Also, part of the point of a forum like this is that people help each other - and that does happen a lot here. I've spent a bit of time helping people out, and I suspect others have spent far more time than me. It actually makes sense - you can't expect the Parallels support staff to have experience of every Windows app, every USB device or every Linux distribution but there might be someone out there who does.
So, if you've had poor "direct" support from Parallels - or if Parallels have been over-reliant on this forum as the front line of support - then you have cause for complaint: by al means go ask for your money back, but I'm not sure if slagging off this forum (and all those who have contributed) is the solution.
I'd be interested to see how the competition copes long-term: personally I think both Parallels and Fusion have a broken business model in terms of support: These products allow long-time Mac users to install & use Windows and Linux. Merely saying that should make anybody who has ever manned an IT helldesk throw up in their mouth a little. You're dealing with all the bugs and complexities of your product multiplied by all the bugs and complexity in the guest OS (and both Linux and Vista have a few...) - you're not going to be able to offer any significant support for that if you sell the product for the bargain-bucket price $80.
In the past, virtualization products for PC have cost several times that - and they were aimed squarely at developers who'd (hopefully) look and say "Ah: I can have bridged networking or shared networking, and there's a DHCP/NAT server here - cool". The PC-hosted virtualization market has also pretty much moved to a model where they give away their base product for free (cool: no support) and charge phone numbers for their well supported "enterprise" versions. Paralells are in a slightly different position because their workstation products are bargain bucket and their "pro" Plesk/Virtuozzo products (AFAIK) use a totally different technology.
I do wonder how much Fusion would have cost if Parallels hadn't got in first and set the price point. I think Parallels have also upped the ante in terms of seamless (ish) MacOS/Windows integration.
Last edited: Apr 26, 2008