I've got Parallels set up and working on with Windows XP on my Mac Pro and apart from problems with Boot Camp everything seems to be working fine. I have no worries about using the Parallels installation for testing but I am still a little hesitant to do any actual serious work in it. Here's why, and I'd be interested to hear if anyone else feels the same way:
- A virtual disk is a single file.
I have two virtual disks, one for the Windows XP installation and one for my data, which is also on a second physical hard drive. However, each of these VDs is just a single file on the hard disk. If anything happens to that file then everything in the VM or the data VD is trashed. On a real Windows installation if something happens to a single file it happens to a single file, not to everything.
- Parallels can disappear from the screen and take everything with it.
If Parallels crashes -- and it is a single program running on the Mac -- it takes the entire operating system and all your data down with it. I already had this happen once with Beta 3120 and it scared the bejeesus out of me. I was moving the mouse past the Parallels window on the desktop with Windows running in it -- I may have clicked somewhere accidentally in passing, I'm not sure -- and suddenly Parallels was just gone, and Windows with it. Poof. Around 30 seconds later a message popped up saying that Parallels had "quit unexpectedly". After restarting XP seemed to be fine but if I had been doing anything serious -- for example a long compile, or working on a big file, the results might have been non-trivial.
I'm not knocking Parallels -- what it does is absolutely amazing -- these are just basic limits imposed by the way a VM must work. The main Windows application I need to use in XP is a help authoring tool for writing Windows software documentation, and the project files can easily contain over 1,000 pages of text. Thinking of Parallels going "poof" in a puff of smoke in the middle of an editing session is not such a nice idea... The fact that build 3150 just trashed my Boot Camp installation beyond repair also isn't helping my confidence at the moment...
Anyone else have any thoughts on this? I know I'm using the betas at the moment for testing so I may be being over-paranoid. OTOH I can remember the bad old days of Word crapping out on long documents in Windows 9x and I really don't have any plans on going through something like that any time soon.
Last edited: Feb 11, 2007