First, let me say that I love the work that is going into Parallels for OS X, really great stuff. But, alas, I am having some serious problems being able to use it. Here is what I see. 1) Bridged networking over Airport is flakey, drops in and out a lot. 2) CD/DVD drive sometimes disappears under heavy use, like installing Visual Studio 2005. 3) The Parallel Shared Folders is a mess, sorry. The performance is horrible and some applications cannot write to the files. For instance, Visual Studio 2005 always gives the error "Cannot save file..... Invalid command". Now I am not trying to be too critical, and I understand this is beta software. Hopefully I can help to make it better and will be more than happy to provide any additional information or tests that needs to be done. I am running the latest Tiger OS on a Core Duo iMac 20". Todd
After some more messing around, it seems that a lot of the problem I have is because the bridged networking is taking a dive. Using Windows and Mac SMB file sharing, the connection between the host and guest machine keeps dying. The network just stops, Mac and/or Windows throws up an error, then the networking will start working again.
I am getting very occasional and very brief drops in my network on the XP guest, but not on my host. The telltale sign is that I will suddenly get a message that the network is connected, but I couple of apps that frequently check for connection disconnect and I have to log into the server again and restart the app (MS Gaming Zone Backgammon and Zone Messenger). BTW, stable all day yesterday after two kernel panics on day one (which were reported). iMac, 2GB, XP Home SP2 guest, Beta 6.
Drops are incredibly frequent. To eliminate them (if you have two network interfaces), share the one you use with the one you're not using, and then tell Parallels to use the new interface. For example, if you connect via ethernet, share your ethernet to computers using wireless, then tell parallels to use wireless.
See my post at http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=4738&highlight=drops+network for the apparent solution to this problem.
