Is 5608 worth it?

Hello,

Just on a whim, I checked this forum to see if any updates to Parallels have been posted (because it is not like a registered user would get notified or anything). Anyhow, I recently upgraded to 5604 to solve some screen issues, and the product has been pretty stable. The only issue I noticed since upgrading was that now I get a "duplicate name on network" error every time I start up XP.

This seems to be a known issue with Parallels, and I was disappointed to not see it fixed in the release notes. I am also scared by some of the known issues in the release notes, so I have to ask: is upgrading from 5604 worth it? Is the network issue fixed and simply not noted?

I rely on Parallels for work, so I need to look at each and every upgrade carefully, esp. since it seems like upgrades are sometimes released in the wild without some generous QA. It would be helpful if some folks posted their two cents on this latest build.

Thanks, in advance,

-- tomo

 

5604 was indeed prematurely released (because it didn't fix all the problems it was supposed to have fixed) hence the release of 5608. So, with all your precautions, ironically, you're actually running a less 'QA'ed' version.

Generally speaking about precautions with software upgrades and all the 'if it's working' theories, I should say that software development is always a work in progress, and generally has two very distinct phases (if the dev team is a responsible team):

1. Feature implementation phase.

2. Code stabilization.

The first one normally receives the big milestone numbers in their version (2, 2.5, 3...), the first interactions at these milestones are the most bug prone ones and the ones you should avoid jump into immediately if what you have is working and you don't need the new announced features specially in important and production machines.

The second phase, the code stabilization, (normally little version increments: 5604 ---> 5608) imply a better and more stable code and generally you should update without much reservations because you will avoid the problems the new version is suppose to correct.

But now you'll say, 'but you just said 5604 is not stable!', that's not true, 5604 is more stable than 5600 and 5600 is more stable than 5584.