Parallels 6 on Mountain Lion - Supported?

Parallels is deleting negative Facebook-Postings, they didn't react on our posts in this forum - only two postings on page 1, where they told us that our Parallel Desktop 6 is useless and where they seemed to lie to us (because nobody here had heart about a free upgrade with lion). They want us to pay lots of money for an upgrade of something we payed for just one year ago. All my programs are working well with the m.l. upgrade - just P.D. failed. I can't support this kind of non-customer-care. I will not buy this upgrade but change to another program. This is really one of the worst ways to handle customer needs. Shame on you!

 

Upgraded to ML... PD6 wont work any more. Forget this. I'm done with shelling out money to this company.

Does virtualbox work with bootcamp partitions? Does anyone have a PD -> VBox transistion guide?

 

Using VirtualBox now

I am using using VirtualBox now, it is not as good as PD6. It is more like PD5 on graphic support and speed. But it is good enough for me. I tried the converting from PD6 to VirtualBox, but it will take too much work since you have to uninstall parallel tools from my windows virtual machine and doing all the converting. I re-install my windows and running great right now.

 

don't think it has bootcamp support. From the 3 hr I spend on virtualbox so far (leaving PD due to this pd6/mountain lion money grab), it seems like a very basic virtualization program. I only run windows occasionally so I am good. If you have to use more advance features, I guess you have shelling out more money. I don't think VM is any better than PD so you might have to choose the less of two evils.

 

Me too.

I also will stop being Parallels customer unless they come up with some reasonable solution to this issue of parallels desktop 6 not supporting mountain lion os. Having paid the full price for the software a year ago, I can't seem to justify paying another $50 just so I can use it on new os. All I want is PD6 to support mountain lion.

 

I managed to successfully migrate my Windows 7 64 Parallels VM to Virtualbox using this walkthrough: http://benfrain.com/osx-converting-parallels-or-vmware-to/

Looking good so far. If anything comes up, I will know in the next couple of days.

Some other source on the net said that you need to deinstall the Parallels tools on the guest VM first, otherwise the guest OS won't start elsewhere. At least in my case, that was not true! I did have to do several repair installs in Virtualbox, and it didn't work until I adjusted RAM settings exactly to the old amount, but it worked fine in the end.

Note that Virtualbox is not as refined a product as Parallels and VMWare (probably, I haven't used VMWare myself yet). Integration features are far from what Parallels can do with its fancy integrating Windows apps into your Mac taskbar and so on. But it does Shared Folders and seamless windows, which is good enough for me. It feels faster than Parallels, but that will have to be confirmed through thorough testing.

 

I payed for the full version of P6 a year ago, now you kick me out. Parallels, you suck.

 

Yep.. Sorry about this, but i think somebody save some money.
Example Paragon software offers FREE update to new version NTFS for Mac.
You don't have PAY! And that was second update (snow lepord -> Lion -> Mountain Lion).
I Like Parallels so i purchased version 7, but i think that is last version and i find alternative (Virtualbox or vmware).

 

Parallels: Just want to let you know, that I agree with most people in this forum. Till yesterday updating to Mountain Lion I used PD6 and I don't buy PD7. You lost me. Bye!

 

Sorry for placing such confusing information, but only customers who bought PD6 few days before PD7 release have been offered a free upgrade due to Lion the recent Lion release. Not everybody

 

Absolutely livid that a £13.99 upgrade results in unexpected hidden costs of £65 from Parallels 6. A fact I have indicated to two additional high bandwidth web-forums as a warning due to the first indication was the unsupported icon for the parallels desktop app!

Developing software of this complexity means Parallels would have known that they would have compatibility issues far in advance of the release date. I'm sorry there's no excuse for this.

I can see some benefit from moving from P6 to P7 but not having to pay the same cost as a new install.

I think the commercial product manager needs to have a think about issuing a post-ML discount or look at his revenue.. unless the £65 is there to cover the churn and drop in user base.

Now I'm stuck not being able to do any astrophotography and I was considering moving my laptop install to my mac..

 

Thanks for clarifying. I'd suggest you offer either a free (or heavily discounted... I mean $10 or less) update to PD7 for ML PD6 customers, or you release an update for PD6 that supports ML. Fail to do either and you'll lose me (and many others) as a customer forever.

 

BYE BYE Parallels....

Just installed VM Fusion. Import my virtual Win 7 and all works PERFECTLY. Feel much better and happy to pay $50 for new software other than additional $50 upgrade (after spent more than $100 already to Parallels).
Thanks a lot Parallel for the time been and wish you to lose money and disappear from the world.
Cheers

 

I just spent my 49$ but on VMware Fusion. It imported my old machine easily -every program works fine. The only issue I had was microsoft wanted to verify my install was only on one computer. Simple 5 minute call to microsoft.
Cheers and goodbye parallels team.

 

The tutorial here still works to get your VM working in VirtualBox for FREE.... for Win 7
http://benfrain.com/osx-converting-parallels-or-vmware-to/

1. Download the trial of Parallels 7; and install Virtual Box
2. Uninstall Parallels tools from your virtual machine. Also take note of how much RAM and CPU, etc is assigned to the Virtual Machine in Parallels.
3. Shut down Parallels and your VM
4. Download trial of VM Ware Fusion 4
5. Import your Parallels Machine to VMWare Fusion 4 (takes over an hour)
6. Shut down VMWare Fusion
7. Search for .vmwarevm ... and Command-Left Click to open the folder containing the file.
8. Right click and hit "Show Package Contents"
9. Highlight all the package contents and copy and paste into Users/YourName/VirtualBox VMs/Win7 (You may substitute Win7 for whatever you want)
10. Open Virtual Box
Click "New" then "Next", then name your OS e.g. "Windows7" and choose the relevant settings on the two drop downs below (Try to match your original Parallels VM settings -- make sure your Windows 7 is 64 bit if you use 64 bit!!).
12. Now click ‘Next’, accept the defaults on the next screen and click ‘Next’ again.
13. On the next screen (headed as ‘Virtual Hard Disk’), click the ‘Existing’ button.
14. On the window that opens, click ‘Add’ on the top menu and browse to the folder you made in Step 9. Choose the file name e.g. Windows7.vmdk (don’t choose the numbered ones e.g. windows7-s016.vmdk) and click ‘Open’.
15. Back on the main screen now, click ‘Next’ again and then ‘Finish’.
16. Before starting your Virtual Machine, you may have to go to Settings...System..Motherboard... and put a check in Enable IO APIC

It's working great for me! I don't use it for gaming and it's just as fast as parallels for basic tasks.




As posted by another user... http://blog.carlossanchez.eu/2011/08...to-virtualbox/ has a great tutorial as well... with some trouble-shooting advice

 

I bought and registered Parallels 6 at the end of July 2011. Parallels 7 was released in September. So no free upgrade offered to me. Had I bought 6 a week or so later I would have been eligible for a free upgrade it seems.

Seeing as how the issue here is that Parallels 6 won't work with OSX 10.8 (though I and it seems many others were able to use it fine with 10.7) what many of us on this thread are suggesting is that Parallels offer at least a discounted upgrade.

The $50 upgrade price is standard, fixed. As a gesture of goodwill to customers you could at least offer something like a 50% price reduction on the cost of an upgrade to parallels 6 users for a limited time. A lot of people - like myself for example - would probably have gone for a $25 upgrade without any fuss at all. As it is, I just bought the full version of Parallels 7 for $35 as part of a deal offered by a retailer. So if they sell the full version at less than half the full retail price, you can offer an upgrade for less than that I'm sure.

The fact that Parallels 6 is the only software I own that is incompatible with 10.8. is a bit odd. I know there are a few others - but from what I have read software manufacturers are working on free patches for them. In all, this does seem to make it appear that Parallels is not addressing this issue solely so that customers will be forced to buy an upgrade. The fact that the upgrade is not being offered at a discounted rate further adds to this impression.

I understand that this is a commercial product and that you need to make money and pay your employees, but if you do not look after your customers, you will lose them, and ultimately it is us who pay your wages. I was already looking into switching from Parallels to Virtualbox to run Windows on one of my Linux Ubuntu machines before this fiasco, now it seems that I'll be exploring that option and likely using that in the future. In today's world there are many options open to a consumer. Offering a high standard of customer service is one thing that will set you apart from everyone else and keep customers coming back. If there's one thing - aside from a bad product - that will make me boycott a company, it is poor customer service, especially in the face of problems and issues with their product.

Again, I re-iterate: all you had to do, Parallels, was offer a heavily discounted upgrade to version 7 for version 6 users and you would have had no problems. You offered a free upgrade for a few months at the end of last year, and the refusal to extend that offer or at least discount the upgrade price now has further exacerbated the situation and upset your customers.

 

Considering options as an ex customer.

After finding that my Parallels 6 does not work any more, I have tried couple options:

1. VMWare Fusion (USD 50) for desktop+laptop license, i.e. 50/2. Works great, no issues with importing virtual machine (Windows XP).
2. VirtualBox (USD 0). Works very fast and very easy to set up.
3. Parallels 7 (USD 41 @ amazon - new purchase).
4. Parallels 7 (USD 50, upgrade @ parallels).

So far, based on trying options: 2>=1>3>4.

Parallels, look at Paragon! Got NTFS driver upgrade (new version) for free! I even did not have to ask - just got an e-mail.

Good buy parallels. You gave me the worst experience of using licensed software. Now I see where piracy starts! Good work!

PS. Parallels just gave me a nice example that I can teach to hundreds of my students in the industrial organization class. Guess: Am I going to mention a name of the company? Yes/No?

 

VMWare Fusion customers' situation is very similar - they had version 3 running on Lion and now they have to upgrade to 4.
Some are even switching to Parallels 7 because they can have it for $29 - while Parallels makes this offer to grab VMWare users, Parallels customers stuck by version 6 on ML must pay $50 to get the upgrade.
I'll be checking Virtual Box - I only need Windows to test websites on Internet Explorer.

 

Migrating Parallels VM to VirtualBox

Here is another how-to, if you want to leave Parallels. Worked fine for my windows 7 vm.
http://blog.carlossanchez.eu/2011/08/01/migrating-windows-7-from-vmware-fusion-to-virtualbox/

 

Bad customer treatment

I cannot understand why Parallels doesn't support a product (Desktop6) anymore when it is only 2 years or less old. Good customer service means to help your customers with the products they own when there is a OSX upgrade and not to use this only as a good opportunity to sell more upgrades on Desktop 7! I am very disappointed about the politics of Parallels! At least you should offer one of those 29$-upgrade offers for Version 6 users who are isolated now after upgrading on Mountain Lion. If you leave customers behind they might leave you behind too!