Should I upgrade from Parallels 3 to 5?

I've got Parallels 3 running on a Macbook Pro, with XP Pro as the OS. I keep getting these emails from Parallels hounding me to upgrade, and the price is reasonable - $40.


Things I don't like about 3:

Whenever Parallels is running I notice a lot more disk activity, and the computer often feels much more sluggish. Sometimes this sluggishness persists after quitting Parallels.

When I launch Parallels and click the "play" button to un-hibernate (or whatever it's called - where the state of the guest OS has been saved) it usually takes about 30 seconds for anything in Windows to respond to a click.


Reasons I might want to stick with 3 and not go to 5:

I have everything working and stable now. I never upgraded to 4 because I kept reading about all the problems people were having with it. I continue to read about problems with 5. But of course you only hear about what's going wrong.


So what do people think? Stick with what...kinda...works? Or is 5 going to be a big improvement over 3?

 

I never ran P3, but used P4 for about a year before upgrading to P5 in December. I had a completely painless transition from P4 to P5, though I ran into some VM reconfiguration issues later that were seemingly pilot error and have been resolved.

P4 was more than adequate, but P5 is quite noticeably faster on windows launch, all disk and file operations, and graphics. I don't do games or fancy graphics in this environment, so I can't comment on these.
I use Windows for only a few things - websites that require Explorer (yes, there are some) and to run custom Windows/Office applications developed by various companies and agencies like US Department of Energy and NREL.

 

No

I've never had version 3, so I don't know how that is. BUT I have P5 that makes mac gets slower in start-up and when shutting down! and all is that the drivers and software has some bugs!! When you own a mac you'd be used to everything working and driving smoothly and FAST! I hope the updates that allways comes will fix the issues.

 

Slows the Mac down when starting up/shutting down? Do you have Parallels set to launch automatically at startup? Or are there hidden processes that happen even when Parallels isn't running?

My Mac is certainly slow enough to start up and shut down, but I would have a hard time saying the culprit was Parallels. Though just what is I have no idea.

 

Robert,

I had the same questions about upgrading but took the plunge this weekend. I upgraded from P3 to P5 and then upgraded my VM from XP to Windows 7. Everything went very well and I'm enjoying it. I've had no major issues. I did have to uninstall Parallels Tools and reinstall in order to get internet access.

 

I promise you it slows it down! During startup maybe not so much (5-10 sec) and that is acceptable (then my overall becomes 45-55 secs). But at shut-down my mac (before parallels) did it in 3 secs. Now it takes 10 secs! Maybe still fast (i don't know) but I think it SUCKS big time. BTW just uninstalled P5 because it had SOOO many problems that it became unuseable to me! Every single function it had that I could benefit from had some kind of flaw that totally ruined it!!!

Now I'm left with a lot of parallels files in my bootcamp section that I would like to get rid of. But don't know how to do it safely without accidentally doing something I shouldn't! Why the F*** doesn't it delete all parallels-related files when I do a complete uninstall?!?!