Ars Technica reviews Parallels 5

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/11/parallels-desktop-5-review.ars

Salient quote:

After going through two separate beta testing sessions (Parallels 4 and 5) and seeing the same, beta-quality releases, I'm at the point where I'm giving up.

 

I second that!

I just shelled out 40€ (yes thats EURO, the US guys pay 40$ which much less, and I bought the us upgrade, because the german version upgrade would have been 50EURO) to get Parallels 5. Which is slower, consumes more RAM, is not 64bit and well, the reason to use Parallels at all is buggy: Chrystal and Coherence.

Yesterday in Chrystal mode several times my open windows programs started to cycle through them as someone would press alt-tab all the time before falling back to coherence automatically.

 

Not sure I agree. I'm running Windows 7 on Parallels 5, and the only major issues I've had were the sound (solved by installing a Realtek sound driver), and the quite humongous memory requirements (an issue for me as I only have 2 Gigs on my machine). But I've been using Windows 7, Office, and a bunch of games without any problems since I've upgraded the driver.

In particular I haven't had stability issues.

Granted, I'm using Parallels in full screen (I'm using Spaces to switch between the Mac and Windows) - but I've never been a great fan of the Coherence mode, and I haven't tried Crystal. One reason I'm running Windows 7 is that I've wanted to enjoy its interface.