Who will convert to VMware Fusion when it is released?

Wow, some people seem to really want to vent. That used to be considered a therapeutic process, the old "get it off your chest" kind of idea.

Offers to help -- to whatever degree -- are now seen as "childish and insulting" but comments like the last four are what? Erudite and congratulatory?

I think what these comments have succeeded in doing is convincing me and some others that remaining silent is the easiest course of action, otherwise one is liable to be flamed to some degree.

But perhaps that is what's desired by some.

Apologist -- that is a religious term. I'm simply describing my experience with Parallels and with computing for over 25 years. And it's always offered FWIW.

 

FWIW, I have sent an email to beta@parallels.com containing these references.

 

I, for one, would just LOVE to know how it is that you can be so highly regarded by parallels "support" when so many of us have never even gotten the courtesy of an answer from them, right or wrong.

Personally, I believe you're either a troll or a shill (betting on troll - I think Parallels is so far out in the ozone that they'd never think of having someone shill for them).

 

I don't know either why others have not gotten responses -- I'm just reporting my experience with Parallels. We'll see what happens with what I've forwarded. And BTW I didn't even look at it. All I did was forward the references.

I'm not a troll, not a shill, don't need to work for anyone else, don't need to endorse anyone else. I have my own company, produce my own software and need reliable software and hardware for my own development work. That's why I'm using Parallels now -- it works for me, is reliable on my systems and gives me what I need, or else I wouldn't be using it.

 

It is time to change and improve

Hello everyone.

Gentlemen,
We can understand those Customers, who needs support from Parallels Support and not getting it. I can understand that some of you feel frustration, unsatisfactory etc, but this is no reason for being excessevly impolite or even rude.
This is no reason to discuss any sort of competitors products - they have their own discussion boards, Parallels boards are intended only for Parallels products discussions.
Personally,as QA Shift Supervisor, I will not make an impracticable promises, that we will have All issues, Support quality inclusively, solved today-tomorrow or any other terms. But I will promise, that we will do our very best, in order to change the Customer's opinion on our Support service from current to better, by making real and noticeable improvements.

Customers cooperation.
We would very much appreciate any kind of feedback on any issue faced by Customer, but feedback is recognized as such only if contains useful information.
Example - having an email or forum post like "You manuals are not helpful" brings very little info, we could use to make the manuals get better - So please, try to be specific, whenever it is possible - Providing us with reasonable feedback is definite good way to improve Support Services.

 

Tom:

Thanks for the reply. As you can see from this thread I forwarded several email requests for support. As I said, I didn't even look at those threads to see what was contained in them. They may all be "support isn't helpful" kinds of messages or they may be very precisely, detailed and useful -- I don't know.

Could you take a moment and list them and comment as to whether or not they are useful, have a solution or....?

It might be very helpful to take a few minutes to do this.

 

I am already cruising on the other boat, the second Fusion beta works perfectly for me. Why? In a nutshell, *stability* of necessary features, which IMO is a must for professional use. Also, technically savy VMWare staff continuously monitor the beta support forum, and post answers to most techninal problems.

Frankly, I never understood the Parallels motivation for spending engineering resources on eye candy features like Coherence, while neglecting the USB stack which is a required feature (USB is the only way to add custom hardware to a VM). To put it simply, I want a product with a bulletproof implementation of the basic functionality. I use VMWare because their products meet this requirement.

 

That's interesting because I use Parallels for its stability AND because, what you call "eye candy", is an important, fundamentally useful feature. For me Coherence is a "must have" and, were it not for Coherence, I'd probably be using Boot Camp.

 

plarusa

It is your choice to choose which Product suits you best, but like I mentioned just 3 msgs above - This Message Board is not dedicated to any other Products except Parallels.
Any posts considered as advertizement will be wiped out and author most likely refused to enter the Parallels Discussion Boards.

drval - Thank you for your efforts and replies.Really appreciate that.

 

Tom - do please keep in mind that Plarusa is commenting on things that are of concern to many of us and should certainly be of concern to Parallels. Reliable functionality, responsive support, core function over nice but not essential features. Don't shoot the messenger because he found solutions with another vendor - he's doing Parallels a favor by sharing his frustration and choices. Win him back with improvements in these areas - the deficiencies are real enough as evidenced by the uptick in participation by Parallels in these forums this past week.

I'm a two-time customer and my wife loves Parallels because her QuickBooks Pro runs on her Mac Mini. I'm a bit less happy because I'm more Unix oriented and that has not gotten the attention I'd like to see. Progress for Parallels Tools for Linux/Solaris have never been mentioned, for example. That is as important to me as coherence is to Val, and for now I've had to jump ship too. I don't need Windows - I need Solaris and Linux. I know I'm not in the majority of your customer base that prefers Windows, but I am none the less a customer.

 

dkp,

Agree on "winning back" strategy - this way we go and will press on further.
But I guess MS forum moderators would delete threads with subjects like "Who will convert from WinXP to Linux" with no hesistation.
Advertizing somebody's else product on vendor's web boards has no real excuse and called spam. Can't imagine how many curses mr. Gates have gathered over years of MS existence.
I aint shoot anyone for being helpful like drval or yourself.Support team appreciates personal efforts from our senior Customers to give a hand to recent joiners.
We have our Wish list for any kind of wishes from our Customers.
Yes, we do have a lot of things to work on and we are working hard to solve most important ones first, such as Phone\Email\Forum support.
True, anyone who have got a licensed copy of any Parallels product is recognized as customer, regardless primary operating system. Be sure - anyone input has a value to us.

 

Perhaps that's why Windows, after all these years, is still considered junk by many. Possibly Mr. Gates hears is nice things when there are lot of not very nice things being said and so improvements are not put in place. I do agree though that antagonism implicit in that title was probably excessive, but it did get the attention desired.

Many of the recent improvements in Parallels were preceded by discussion (sometimes to death) in these forums. While cause/effect cannot be firmly established, I'm going to go ahead and take some credit for some improvements for my part in raising the security problems with the earlier global sharing defaults to a high level such that improvements were made. And while Val did not agree, his participation in that debate was essential to keeping the topic alive.

 

Or perhaps it's part of the reason that it's still the dominant OS despite all of the criticism.

Most users want functionality and, when that appears, some will attack it and criticize it -- whether that leads to something useful or not. It is in the nature of things that it's easier to criticize, easier to tear down then it is to create or build up.

I'm not saying that criticism should be suppressed but I am saying that it, at times, needs to be moderated, if it doesn't provided its own moderations. Content can be expressed in a number of ways and, IME, it is generally better to be moderate in expression, as far as that is possible.

I don't think it was the antagonism that got the response. It is just as likely -- if not more so -- that the response actually came after I sent a polite note to beta@parallels.com asking for a response to threads that had been submitted to me because of frustrations others had experienced. You have your belief about what happened and, as any good psychologist knows, intermittent reinforcement is the most powerful in conditioning responses. This is what happens in gambling. So there may be a number of reasons that some people continue to believe that beligerence is the "better" course.

I generally prefer a gentler, more collegial and congenial response -- unless that doesn't get a similarly respectful response.

 

Well, I'm glad someone from Parallels has joined the discussion. Welcome, Tom.

You might want to take a look at this thread: http://forum.parallels.com/thread10015.html

There's a clear instance of Parallels consuming an average of 8% processor usage when, as far as we know, it's doing absolutely nothing. No virtual machines are loaded or running. There are steps there on how to reproduce it (load virtual machine, open open configuration error).

Here's another one, with a note on how to increase processor usage to about 60% by just loading Skype, while Windows processor usage remains at 3% (probably related to your network driver):

http://forum.parallels.com/thread9874.html

In the same thread you will find notes as to how enabling USB seriously increases processor usage when idle.

Are these the sort of details you expect? While the instructions may seem simple, the problems are easy enough to reproduce. "Turn option on, watch problem".

Do let us know what Parallels plan of attack is. Regards,


Ricardo

 

A simple question, How do I get Windows 98 to operate correctly? The install procedure in MS Virtual PC is great. The install procedure in VMware is a bit clunky. Your install procedure totally fails to work and it took me several hours to figure out a bizarre and convoluted install procedure.


None of the *.fdd images was recognized on my computer. Importing Win98 VM totally messed up Parallels and OSX 10.4.8. With a reinstall of Parallels and updating to OSX 10.4.9 this worked

1) Create a Win98 folder on your Mac
2) from BootDisk.com download the DOS6.22.iso The 1.4meg *.iso file
3) Create an *.iso from your Win98 boot disk
4) Perhaps not needed, put some 1.4 meg *.fdd file in the Win98 folder
5) Place both the Win98.iso and the DOS6.22.iso into the Win98 folder
6) Run the "OS Installation Assistant" to create a typical Win98 virtual machine.
7) After first attempt fails with no boot device,
7a) set boot to CD first,
7b) point CD to the DOS6.22.iso
7c) point Floppy to the junk *.fdd file
8) start Virtual machine
9) run fdisk create dos partition accept all defaults
10) restart Virtual machine
11) from the CD (R: ?) run format c: /s
12) after format is complete run from the CD xcopy *.* c:
13) shut down Virtual Machine
14) set boot to HD
15) restart virtual machine
16) Optional copy the Win98 directory from the CD to the HD
17) CD into the Win98 Directory and run setup.

The best performance I've been able to achieve is in the slow low memory i486 range. Like people are pointing out, this is no longer beta software. If your product does not support Win98 please say so up front.

MS Virtual PC is slow but not that slow.

 

I would recommend for the benefit of the new Parallels team we allow this thread to die and begin again fresh at the top of the forum with new or refreshed existing issues. This thread has a potentially short life.

 

I've been very happy with Parallels Desktop for OSX. I give it high marks for performance, usability, and reliability.

I do development work in OSX and Windows so all I need is something that will run Windows quickly and stably so, I don't care about eye candy like Coherence or 3D support.

Here are the features that could entice me to switch to "the competition":

1. Dual-core support is moderately important to me. I don't really need the extra performance, but I DO need to test my Windows software in an SMP environment to see if there are any issues. This hasn't been a big issue personally for me yet, though I expect it to become more important in the coming year.

2. Snapshot backup functionality. Backing up my 30GB Parallels images is a huge pain. What I need to do, for testing purposes, is to maintain multiple snapshots of a machine so that I can quickly test different configurations.

I understand that Parallels is probably working on these so I'm not switching yet, although the only thing keeping me from trying the Fusion beta is a lack of Parallels image conversion.

(I've also heard that the reason Parallels doesn't have #2 is because "the competition" has some key patents in this area. Technically it's relatively simple; but Parallels has their hands tied by red tape. Or so I've read. Take it with a grain of salt.)

 

Coherence is a bit more than just eye candy, it:

(a) Makes better use of screen "real estate" c.f. running the windows desktop in a OS X window.

(b) Is currently the only practical way of making windows apps use dual monitors.

 

I remember reading somewhere quite a while ago now too that VMware has several patents pertaining to the development of snapshots for virtual machines. I don't remember the legality of it (I'm not doing law at university!) but maybe that's enough of a reason for the Parallels team to be hesitant about including that feature. Scare tactics perhaps.

I've been trying VMware Fusion at the same time as Parallels for FreeBSD 6.2 Stable and Slackware Linux and have had mixed results by both. The problem with Fusion at the moment is the current builds have debug mode enabled by default, so it's substantially slower. With the final release or some later betas when they've disabled that it will be more interesting. The fact that VMware has tools for FreeBSD, Solaris and Linux is VERY compelling.

For the time being though FreeBSD with KDE and Xfce and the custom X11 modeline configuration to allow the widescreen on Parallels works nicely. I agree with dkp though in that *NIX is the killer feature for me; VMware seems more interested in this area. I have very little interest in Windows other than to play Train Simulator and Age of Empires.

 

I won't, for sure.