Just upgraded from 4.0 to 5.0 and have been trying everything new... With my XP Pro SP3 VM, I cannot see any difference at all between Crystal and Coherence. In fact, when I select Crystal as my view (and it gets checked), the pop-up translucent black help dialog says "Your virtual machine is in Coherence..." The Help talks about having a parallels icon in my menu bar - but it is not there, nor any other aspect of Crystal discussed there. Everything looks identical to Coherence - except that in the View menu, "Crystal" is checked. Am I missing something? Is Crystal just something for Windows 7 or something? Thanks, Karl
Crystal mode is Coherence mode without Parallels Desktop icon in Dock and with Parallels Desktop icon in menubar.
Your reply was supposed to contain some information not in my original post?? I know what Crystal is ... it will not work consistently / properly with an XP machine. It works fine with a Win 7 machine. I believe I found the bug that kept it from working for me - although this could have been a random thing. I went back to windowed mode, then from the Parallels View menu, I hid the taskbar, then went back to Crystal and this time the parallels icon appeared properly in the menu bar and all worked fine. I have the tray icons there, and all is working again. But, I was unable to enter Crystal after about 10 tried in various ways originally.
To be clear, what means "it not works properly": 1. The problem is that you have Parallels Desktop icon in Dock even in Crystal mode? 2. The problem is that you don't have Parallels Desktop icon in menubar even in Crystal mode? 3. Something else? Sorry, I failed to figure that out from your post. To save the time, also send a problem report (Help -> Report a Problem...) at the time when Crystal mode works "not properly". And about Windows XP: no, Crystal mode designed to work with any Windows version that supports Coherence. I beleive that the problem you have was not related to Windows version, but to some other factors.
When it was not working after the initial upgrade to 5, everything was as if in Coherence: the PD icon was in the dock and there was no PD icon in the menubar - yet the PD View menu had a checkmark next to Crystal. Kept going back and forth between view modes, and Crystal always displayed identically to Coherence. After doing non-reproducible steps (because I cannot really recall what I did to get around this), Crystal started working properly.
Ok, the problem looks like you have 2 or more VM's running simultaneously - in that case Parallels Desktop will actually switch to Crystal only when both VM's will use Crystal mode. So, when you are running 1 VM - you have the Crystal, when running 2 or more - don't, because Crystal mode selected not in all running VM's. Is that true for you?
The other big difference is you no longer have the Parallels menus when in any Parallels program. The menubar icon is the only way to get to Parallels options. Personally, while the options are nice, these two modes are confusing to most people as they are so similar. I think having one mode that hides the windows desktop with some checkbox options would have been better. So in the preferences, you would just have a section that says when you hide the guest os desktop, you either have the Parallels normal menus, or the menubar icon. This would simplify the View menu to having Normal, Full Screen and whatever you call the integrated option (Coherence, Integrated, Hidden or whatever).
Shared folder access difference / Crystal vs Coherence I've had none of the problems I originally reported with the recent updates to Parallels 5. I prefer Crystal because the Parallels menu and the Windows tray icons appear in my Mac menubar. I'm running XP in my VM. In my wife's Windows 7 Pro VM, we have found that Quickbooks can see but not open its data file on a parallels shared folder when running in Crystal. It works fine in Coherence. So there is some kind of subtle difference in how shared Mac folders are presented to apps in Crystal vs Coherence (makes no sense!!) - that forces her to run in Coherence mode. It is 100% reproducible and has happened in each release of Parallels 5. So, there is something besides just appearance that distinguishes Crystal and Coherence.
