Is it worth upgrading from v7 to v9?

I got an email today from Parallels about upgrading for $50. The reason I never upgraded from v7 to v8 was because I had always been disappointed with upgrades in the past. Each year Parallels promises 20% speed improvement on this, and 40% speed improvement on that, etc.

I have never noticed one whit of speed improvement going from v5 to v6 to v7. So I sat out the v7 to v8 upgrade.

My biggest speed complaint is that it takes forever for a guest VM, typically Windows 7, to start up from a suspended state. Plus after I quit Parallels my Mac generally seems to run slower for a while afterwards. I have a late 2009 iMac running Mountain Lion with a 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 12 GB of RAM. In past years people have also mentioned I just need a faster machine, and I have upgraded my machine several times, but obviously can't do that every year.

So my question is, is the upgrade from v7 to v9 worth it? I also have Windows 8 running fine in a VM in v7. There didn't seem to be anything especially difficult about installing that system. I basically just use Parallels for browser compatibility testing.

The only reason, frankly, that I am even considering it is because my iMac will very occasionally have a kernel panic, and over at the Apple forums people examined the log and most say the problem is probably v7, which they claim leaves "things in the background" which can cause instability, even when Parallels is not running.

Any thoughts would be great to hear.

Thanks,

doug

 

Depends on what you do with your VM and if you want to access them with your phone, if you have an iPhone. To fix some of you speed problems you are having with your VMs, go into the HD settings for the VM and make it take up the full allocated space (turn off expanding disc). Also if you have a way to defragment you Mac HD do that after you do that, it will keep that 60g or whatever the HD size you selected in one place never changing the size so it wont grow and shrink and be spread all over the HD.

I am running Parallels Desktop 8 on my 2008 Mac Pro 2x2.8ghz with 10g and have never had a slowdown in either OS, unless I am using a lot of CPU in one of them but it still wasn't super bad or something I didn't expect.

 

With regards to speed increases in 9 over 8, there is none in Ubuntu 13.04 LTS and Deepin, the two Linux distros I use. Both are painfully slow, although the mouse in Ubuntu is a little more sensitive. Haiku OS is still not supported. No difference in Windows 7 but then again that's always been OK by me. Not worth the upgrade from 8 to 9.



Rich::

 

I don't use the LTS for Ubuntu and it seems to work rather well for me. I haven't heard of the other. Ya without being able to use my phone then I am not upgrading. Maybe I'll look into the competition.

 

In my case it would be going from v7 to v9

Why might one want to access on their iPhone? Isn't the screen way too small to do anything?

Thanks,

Doug

 

Because who wants to bring a 10"+ device with them everywhere when they have a phone with them. You obviously never used the Parallels Mobile app they killed

 

That's correct. I have not. I use the VMs mostly for browser testing. I don't imagine that would be an enjoyable experience on a 4" iPhone.

So is the consensus that besides the phone access there isn't much reason to upgrade from v7?

Thanks,

Doug

 

Actually, there is one. I just found it.

I previously stated that there was no speed bump in Ubuntu 13.04. Actually, there can be. Delete the existing install and start afresh using the inbuilt wizard. It now installs Ubuntu 13.04 and the speed is much better.

Aside from that, no difference from what I can tell really.



Rich::

 

I used mine to check in on a Rendering project, blue ray converting progress, or some other large project when I am not at home.

 

These are probably the most important new features of PDM9 (compared to PDM8):

* Direct connection to Firewire and Thunderbolt storage devices
* Boot from USB
* DirectX 10 support
* Cloud storage integration, Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox. No need to install these apps on the VM, or duplicate files, they appear as shared folders in the VM.
* Power Nap extends to Windows applications (for instance, receive Outlook email in Windows while the machine's sleeping).
* The ability to use the classical Start Menu on Windows 8 and 8.1, and metro apps as windows.
* PDF printer for Windows
* Shared applications and profiles for Linux

 

Those features sound ok, none I really care about and the loss of features I do use makes it a no go for me.

 

There are actually features which get lost?

Anyway, as I mentioned in my original post, I skipped v8 altogether. So I'm mostly interested in whether this is worth it as an upgrade from v7.

For example, I sometimes (not often) get a kernel panic even when not using Parallels. At the Apple forums some people are saying that's a known problem with Parallels v7 because of some helper that continues to always run in the background. Anybody ever hear anything like that?

Thanks,

doug

 

I went to v8 because of the problems I had with v7 on OSX 10.8. So if you don't use any remote to control your VM then I would upgrade if price is right or crashing is a major problem for you. Just remember that every version of Parallels Desktop at launch always has some bugs or other problems, at lease for me they have.

 

Did you find any improvements going from v7 to v8?

Thanks,

doug

 

I upgraded to 8 because I was having problems with my 10.8 machine with v7 and Parallels Mobile worked better. Now they killed Parallels mobile, but luckily I haven't upgraded to v9. Not sure if I will. If they don't change or fix things I may go back to VMWARE, which I used to used to Parallels offered more for less, now they don't.

 

Well, I guess I'm being more or less forced to upgrade since I got the following email saying if I upgrade to Mavericks my current Parallels 7 will not work:

 

So, it appears that there's no clear consensus on whether upgrading from PD7 to PD9 is worth the money.

In my case, I'm running PD7 on an Early 2008 MacBook4,1 with 6GB RAM and a 600GB SSD. I trialled PD8, but found a major bug with it wherein changing the guest OS IME language would change the host OS IME language (un-freakin'-believable!). I reverted back to PD7. I have two questions regarding PD9:

1. Is performance of PD9 on my hardware equal to or better than PD7 with XP and W7 VMs?
2. Did the Input Method Editor bug that reared its ugly head in PD8 ever get fixed?

 

I had decided against upgrading. But then a few days ago I got another email from Parallels with an offer for a $10 iTunes card if I upgraded 7 for the $49.99. So it really became $39.99 and I went ahead and did it.

As usual, I can't detect any speed or other improvements after the upgrade in Windows 7 or Windows 8 VMs.

I was going to investigate VirtualBox as an alternative, but just don't really have the time to mess with this. Plus I don't have a lot of extra space on my HD right now for extra VMs. So I took the easy way out.

Maybe Parallels is basing their hope on harried and threatened customers who don't have the time or patience to do anything else (like me), rather than good service?

doug

 

I only noticed that it booted Parallels slightly fast and the VM loaded a little bit faster after the second or third load but not much faster.

I did notice that I now have problems in Ubuntu 13 that I didnt have before, when using their video player to play a video in full screen in the VM it reboots the VM. They really need to work on drivers and make them work right if they want people to upgrade.

It usually, since v7 takes them about 3-5 updates to fix the problems with the new version, if they fix them all. I hope they put more focus on other OSes, instead of just getting Windows great. I rarely use Windows and all OSes need care.

 

One potentially compelling reason to upgrade to v9 from v7 is that v7 is a couple years old, and we're about to get a major OS X update to Mavericks. Whereas PD9 is apparently designed to support Mavericks, of course v7 was not.