Should I upgrade from Parallels 4 to 5?

I have read a lot about how the initial release of Parallels 5 had great features but also contained many bugs. I also read that users are satisfied with the fix(es) distributed in the December update which appears to have addressed many of these issues. However, I do read that start-up of Parallels 5 can be very slow - on the order of several minutes. Before the update, the consensus was that it was problem with Spotlight and worked around it by turning it off (not acceptable to me). More recently I have heard it remains a problem after the upgrade.

Since I only use Parallels on occasion, start-up time is important to me. I do not want it to consume memory and cycles on my MacBook when I do not need it, so I want the guest OS to be readily available to me on demand. I understand that there are a lot of features in 5 that I would love, but slow start-up is a show-stopper for me.

Have others continued to experience this issue? Are there other issues that an occasional user like myself would find annoying? Will I have to re-register all my Microsoft applications and OS since it now believes it is on a new machine? That would also cause me to want to put off the upgrade.

Thanks!

Paul

 

Hello,

First of all I would like to say, that in most cases Windows boot time in PD5 is less than in PD4.

And AFAIK all discovered "slow Windows startup" problems in PD5 are a) either was already fixed in PD5 Update2, or b) will be fixed in next update(s).

 

Thank you. As an aside, I was surprised when the forum did not automatically notify me of your reply. So, if I post a question, I need to then subscribe to the thread? I will look to see if there is a preferences setting someplace.

Paul

 

Thank you. As an aside, I was surprised when the forum did not automatically notify me of your reply. So, if I post a question, I need to then subscribe to the thread? I will look to see if there is a preferences setting someplace.

Paul

 

Yes. It's definitely worth it.

 

Hmm, it's strange, check your settings. At least I received the notification when you added last message