Agreed...but I'm still using Tiger and I have massive acknowledged stability problems in Parallels. That is why I'm now looking for an alternative. Every so often Parallels and the virtual machine will just disappear from the screen in a fraction of a second. Completely, just gone, as though they'd never been there. This issue has been confirmed by other users and by Parallels support and the best they have been able to suggest so far is "turn off sound support, maybe that will help". It doesn't. In addition to this Vista VMs crash out to a blue screen regularly while just sitting there doing nothing, with no programs loaded. Obviously, this is probably also a Vista issue, but a VM is supposed to provide a completely compatible virtual hardware environment, and it seems that Parallels doesn't.
I've been cutting the Parallels team a lot of slack for a long time because I work in the software business myself and I do know how difficult these things are. I really, really wanted them to succeed. But I'm now coming around to the opinion that the Parallels developers have their priorities wrong. Virtual machine software is serious, heavy metal computing and they are much too interested in fluff and whizzbang bells and whistles that look good on feature lists, whilst apparently neglecting the solid foundations that are all that really matters. For example the insane automatic file associations between OSX and Windows VMs, which are activated by default and basically just create an unholy mess, particularly if you use a lot of VMs. Or the alleged decision to alter the Windows OS code to make it play nice with Parallels when accessing Boot Camp partitions in VMs, which, if true, is simply an unforgivable programming sin (I have read this in several places but can't confirm it myself -- however, the mess that is Windows after Parallels has set up VM access to Boot Camp makes me tend to believe it).
You just need to know a small bit about how difficult virtualization is to understand how impressive what Parallels has achieved is. And that is exactly why I am now tending more towards VMWare and hoping that they have produced a more solid product -- I've been using their products on Windows machines for years and their stability has always been outstanding. I can't say the same for Parallels, but that doesn't mean they are bad programmers or a bad company. They just have less experience and they also seem to have chosen some unfortunate policies recently.
Last edited: Nov 16, 2007