Looking for Cool Parallels Stories

J

josh@parallels

Parallels Team
Hey everybody, it's Josh from the Parellels Marketing Team. I'm looking for cool stories fom real users about how you're implementing the Desktop product. I'd like to hear about how you're using it in the office, for school, for fun, to run older applications on classic OSes, and so on.

Just tell me what guest OS you're running, what applications you're using on it, and how it's helped you.

You can e-mail me directly at jmarans@parallels.com

Thanks, and I hope you continue enjoying Parallels Desktop!
 
josh@parallels said:
Hey everybody, it's Josh from the Parellels Marketing Team. I'm looking for cool stories fom real users about how you're implementing the Desktop product. I'd like to hear about how you're using it in the office, for school, for fun, to run older applications on classic OSes, and so on.

Just tell me what guest OS you're running, what applications you're using on it, and how it's helped you.

You can e-mail me directly at jmarans@parallels.com

Thanks, and I hope you continue enjoying Parallels Desktop!
Click to expand...

Hey, here's a cool Parallels story:

Once Parallels Desktop Final Version was released, it seems that all of the tech support has been thrown out the window. Sounds like an interesting story to me.
 
Josh,

My company has mac and PC software. I am using it to demo both to customers and the support has been great for me!

Bill
 
I'm using Win2k as guest, which I prefer to XP so boot camp is a suboptimal solution. I use PCs for software development, and need things like email, etc. in the PC environment, so even though I could theoretically switch everything to Mac, maintaining identical versions on my desktop and laptop is a requirement. So I can now sync email and development projects between laptop and desktop, and work wherever I am in the PC environment, and enjoy having a Mac as well, and all in a 5.5 pound package.

Now if only full USB 2.0 pass through were available, the Mac would do everything I need in a portable machine.

And BTW, I think that post about support is an undeserved cheap shot by someone who is acting very selfishly by assuming he ought to be the center of your universe. (IMNSHO)
 
joem said:
And BTW, I think that post about support is an undeserved cheap shot by someone who is acting very selfishly by assuming he ought to be the center of your universe. (IMNSHO)
Click to expand...

How is it a cheap shot? Some people have been waiting for weeks with no response from Parallels. I PAID for software that isn't working. That's selfish? Since when? Read this, I'm not the only one:

http://forums.parallels.com/thread3038.html
 
Personally I am using Parallels to switch from a Dell to do our Windows Mobile development. We do commercial Windows Mobile development and it was only because of Parallels that we were able to switch our main dev machines back to the Mac.

So that's been great. I've had zero issues with the product in what I use it for. USB support is not good at all, but thankfully I don't use that - yet. I am concerned about the lack of support, though. At least acknowledge people's issues.
 
I work as a consultant. Naturally most of my clients have "the other OS" installed. I wanted to switch to a Mac (20x years PC-user) but I had to have access to Win XP. When Apple released boot-camp my heart begun to beat a little harder. It still seemed like to much trouble though. But then a friend sent me an article from the Register which had a lot of information about virtualization technology. One company mentioned was Parallels. After some research in the forums, I went to the nearest Aplle Store and bought a MacBook Pro. Home, downloaded Parallels desktop and started instaling Win XP. After about half an hour or so, I was up and running. Next step was to order a real license for Parallels Desktop and get going. Now I do most my work in OS X but when I visit a customer which has special PC-applications, I just fire up Parallels Desktop and is ready to go in about 30 sec. It's wonderful! When you combine it with virtue desktops, even the most hardcore WinXP-fan is amazed!

Thanks a lot for this magnificent product!
 
Bootcamp OUT - Parallels IN

I LIVE on my Mac (MBP), but I make my LIVING in the PC World (Delphi, SQL Server, Watchguard Firewall and a few esoteric programming languages that are NOT available on the Mac).
Prior to my MBP, I was carrying 2 laptops with me, My Powerbook and a Thinkpad. Shortly after purchasing my MBP, Bootcamp (B) was released by Apple and I thought I could NOT be any happier. I was able to boot into XP (after partitioning 30 G for XP) do my work and anytime I needed to go back to OSX, I would shut down XP and Reboot. That took about 3-4 Min and while I had to do that many times during the day, it was a small price to pay for not carrying 2 computers (chargers, et. al).

The fact that (B) requires a FIXED SIZE partition and there is no easy way to RESIZE it meant that my 100G disk had < 60 gig for OSX (could not carry my music and photo library with me, they were both about 20 G). (P), of course, with the variable sized Virtual HD gave me back about 15-20G, YEA!

I tried Parallels (P) during the beta and decided to stay with (B) until (P) was released. (there were too many little bugs (especially with networking) during the beta for me to use it for development.

Once (P) was released, I tried it again and WOW, Almost everything works FINE! It is SO nice to hit a single key (OK, 2 keys, ALT-ENTER) and switch from running XP in a full screen to running it in a window with access to ALL my OSX programs. The ability to use the clipboard to copy between OSX and (P) has been an real advantage.

I was sceptical about the performance with Virtualization and the fact that my 2G of Ram was shared between OSX and (P). I was pleasantly surprised to see that the application in focus would run at about 95% of the speed compared to (B). This was very acceptable!

In addition, I am now (finally!) doing REAL backups. It is a breeze to copy my Virtual HD (1 File) to my backup disk.

Of course, all is not perfect. I am waiting (impatiently!) for the next upgrade that handles function keys a little better, better USB support. At this point, I would give (B) a "7" on a 0-10 score and (P) gets a 9+.

Bruce
 
Just replaced my work PC ...

Hi,

I develop software for handhelds for businesses, so a lot of specific tools need to work under Parallels for me to be able to get things done.

I replaced a setup that looked like this:
- PC with XP (development environment)
-- running a VMWare image of Windows 2000 running SQL Server (client environment)

with a MacBook running Parallels.

This allows me to debug under XP and connect via network to the W2K PC - seamlessly.
There is no problem connecting to VPNs or Palm handhelds using USB. I can run SQL server.

As a bonus, it's about 20% faster when compiling.

A great product!
 
I used to use a PC and my iBook networked together on my desk to do my job as Web Developer and Graphic Designer. Our organization is entirely PC except for myself. When we heard of Parallels my boss figured we could give it a shot and go completely Mac on my desktop.

We bought an Intel iMac, loaded up Parallels, and installed Windows XP. I now use Parallels every day and Vitrue to switch between them. I couldn't be happier. I can do my Web Development and Design on Mac OS, and use special applications like Oracle Forms, Report Builder, PL/SQL Developer, and Outlook on Parallels. To share files we have both OSX and XP connected to our Windows Server shares and everything works perfectly.

Recently we went a bit further and cloned my Windows XP installation to create a seperate copy with Internet Explorer 7 Beta installed. We now also have a Windows 98 image as well to test our web sites. Its absolutely the best setup possible for a Web Developer, and I am in development bliss. Being able to build some CSS and HTML in OSX, test it on Safari and Firefox, and then whip over to Windows XP to test it in Internet Explorer is brilliant.
 
I just wanted to take a step back and state that having the ability to run XP Pro on my MacBook Pro using Parallels is proving to be a great boon to my professional productivity. I travel on business regularly and in the past I had to forsake my Mac as my travel computer during these trips to assure that I had the Windows tools that many of my clients require. Now I can travel with my MBP and have everything I need with that computer.

I have had some issues with network connectivity on the XP side at some wireless hot spots, particularly T-Mobile, due to the way they have their wifi network configured (discussed in another thread), but other public wireless providers (e.g., AT&T) don't pose a limitation. I also have also not yet been able to get my XP VM to work with the Apple USB modem when I find myself having to depend on dial-up (I understand that this should work, but I haven't gotten it to), but in most cases, I can work around that by moving data files around using a shared folder and using networking on the Mac side to get data where I need it to go. Therefore I can now redeploy and dedicate my Windows laptop to another task ... using it for astrophotography with my Meade telescope, where the software is only available for Windows.

In my office environment I use a PowerMac Dual 2.0 G5, and had given up on using VirtualPC as it is just way too slow and had too many limitations. (Using VPC on my older 800 MHz/1 GB TiBook was a total non-starter.) So I always had to crank up my Windows laptop to run Windows apps. Now I use my MBP when I need Windows. (Also note that the MBP in most ways is an equal if not better performer than the PowerMac) When the time comes to replace the PowerMac, in a year or so, I will definitely replace it with either the next generation Intel based "MacPro" tower or even an iMac so I can run Parallels on it. Assuming (which is not a stretch) that the performance on an Intel based iMac is at least as good as the MBP the iMac may be the logical next step. The only real drawback for me on the iMac is the limited disk internal disk space.

In any case, I just wanted to express the positive effect that then new Intel based Macs and Parallels has had for me personally.
 
Parallels Desktop for Mac gives me unparalleled productivity on my MacBook Pro.

I work for a developer that specializes in documentation management software. The solution can be deployed on Windows and UNIX-based systems. With Parallels, I can demonstrate the product to the customer according to the intended deployment platform.

One of my tasks is to streamline and document the installation procedures on various operating system (Solaris, Windows, Linux, Mac OS) and database (Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL) configurations.

With Parallels, I can experiment with different virtual machine hardware setups. When appropriate, I save a snapshot of the guest OS to my external hard disk. That way, I can test and verify the various stages of the installation procedures by restoring the guest OS.

Having struggled with VirtualPC (since version 2) and RealPC (now defunct) for many years, Parallels on Intel-based Macs is a winning combination. Parallels would be even better by resolving USB support issues and improving video support.

One annoying hiccup is that Solaris 10 x86 platform regularly hangs on boot up. Both (1/06) and 96/06) builds have the same problem. I'm running with 512 MB and 1 GB RAM setups. My workaround is to reset the VM. It usually boots fine the second time around. I read elsewhere in the forum that this problem doesn't occur when the RAM is reduced to 256 MB. I've yet to try this.
 
I use Parallels to run my Windows Quicken 2004 program. This has allowed my to dump, altogether, a microsoft pc running Windows and I couldn't be happier. I backup my Quicken data to a Cruzen mini 1.0 GB USB stick without problem. It is detected, faithfully, by Parallels and I can print using my HP laserjet 1300 from Windows via network settings. Can things be improved, of course. Am I happy with how things are now, you bet. Keep it up Parallels, you're doing just fine by me. :)
 
I'm using Parallels on my Macbook to run (1) Quicken 2005, so I don't have to use the cripple Quicken for mac software, and (2) My Pfaff 3D embroidery software for my sewing machine, which did not work under Virtual PC, by the way. Both an tremendously quick and parallels is a joy to use.

Something that I did not think would work, but did: I was able to use remote assistance with my mother's PC online, fixing her problems while never having to go find an actual PC. What an amazing, simplifying concept! Thanks for your product!

-----
MacBook (black) 2 GB.
 
I have a production Linux server I support part time and it needed some code installed that has to be compiled from source. It has no dev environment on it, and I have no other Linux system as we're predominantly a Solaris shop. Then I realized I have a perfectly good but completely unused Fedora VM installation on my Mac as a whim of curiosity. So I wget'd the source over to it, built some configure scripts and ran make, make test, make install. Damn, there it is. I packaged it up, sent it to the prod system and damn again, there it is and it's working fine.

Cost to me: Some time.

dp .. who remains Parallels' happiest customer
 
Linux From Scratch

I used Parallels Desktop to work through the Linux From Scratch book, using the LFS LiveCD. I didn't run into any problems whatsoever, and doing it in Parallels instead of on the "bare metal" has many advantages. To name a few:

* You get a comfortable environment to look up information in, and switching to other activities is quick and painless.
* You can make backups of the entire system at critical points (this can be done on the bare metal, but I can't think of a solution that's as safe and easy).
* By suspending the guest, you can shut down the host without losing system state. This is handy when setting up the environment anew would require a lot of work.

I guess these points hold for most other uses of Parallels Desktop as well.

I also used Parallels to run tools from Xilinx in Windows XP for a HDL project.

/Ulf Magnusson
 
joem said:
And BTW, I think that post about support is an undeserved cheap shot by someone who is acting very selfishly by assuming he ought to be the center of your universe. (IMNSHO)
Click to expand...

Not at all. I'd have had a nice story about migrating QA for four varieties of windows, several linux variants and possibly solaris/x86 away from vmware to parallels, so that everyone could work from their Macs. But when Parallels support folks don't bother responding to the most basic of pre-sales questions it seems unlikely that they're going to be a company that's reliable enough to use for business use.

So they've likely lost some sales for now. If they want to sell to business, and compete with vmware, they need to mature as a company.
 
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