Complete Honesty

So- gonna be completely honest here and just want some good advice.

I have a pirated copy of Parallels 7, because I wanted to try it. It works great, and now I've had the need to use it for business. IT was unsure if they'd be able to install all the licensing stuff required for my job, but they ultimately were. Parallels is great, and I want to upgrade to Parallels 8 (and pay for the 7 I'm currently using).

My question is: can I buy the Parallels 8 package, and upgrade my current, pirated 7 without losing everything that IT has installed? I understand Parallels owes me nothing at this point, but it is a great product and works flawlessly for me, so I want to buy. If IT hadn't put hours into getting it where it needs to be I'd simply uninstall, buy and reinstall, but by this point its alot of time investment.

Thanks for anyone that can point me in the right direction!

 

I'm not sure what you mean by what the IT dept. installed, due to context, I can only assume that these are apps installed on the Windows VM. You can buy the full PDM8, but first uninstall the pirated PDM7, this won't delete your Virtual Machines (usually located in /Users/<username>/Documents/Parallels, of course, you can also backup these), you can install PDM8 and import/open your PDM7 VMs.

Caveat: I have no idea how the pirate copy actually works, if it changes any file, and if it renders the VMs impossible to read in a legit install.

 

Good insight, thank you!

You are correct. There are VPN-like applications that are licensed based that give me access to a corporate intranet installed within Windows in PDM7, as well as a point of sale/ account management system that is not compatible with Mac and LogMeIn host. Originally they were unsure that they could get them installed and operational in the VM, but they ultimately worked- I dont want to mess up that installation.

What would happen were I to buy and install PDM8 and try to run that with 7 still installed *but not running* on my machine? Wouldn't that be a safer way to test if everything was operational? I wonder if I could just hit the upgrade link and see if it prompts me to pay?

 

You can't have two versions of Parallels installed, PDM8 will try to remove PDM7. Because I have no idea if the pirate version changes any files or adds new one I think it's safer to remove PDM7 before installing PDM8.

Your data is in the .pvm files, when installing and uninstalling nothing is changed there till you launch the VM in PDM8. The safest way would be to make a backup of the computer, via TM for instance that you could roll back to.