Parallels Desktop for Mac build 3120 RC1 is available for download.

Hello everyone!

Parallels Desktop for Mac build 3120 is now available for download.

Additional details and download information is available on this page: http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/beta_testing/

PLEASE REMEMBER: this is a Release Candidate software. While this build gives you the rough understanding of the final set of features to be available in Final Release later on, it is still a “Candidate†and thus is still not recommended for production use. Do backup your virtual machines before trying them with this build.

This build introduces a new feature and provides several very important fixes to the problems found in previous Betas:

* The widest list of fixes is USB ones! Web cameras should be working since this build. A number of other devices reported non-working by beta-testers in previous builds should work now as well. The known issues list is below:

* iSight doesn’t work yet. You will notice it sending data, but no picture available
* Several other web cameras won’t work with similar symptoms;
* Logitech web cameras are reported not to work with drivers pack versions 10.4 and 10.5;
* Connecting USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 devices to VM simultaneously will most probably lead to both of them not working;
* Some Palm devices will still not to work.​

* True “Drag and Drop†functionality - a long awaited feature that lets you seamlessly drag and drop files and folders from Windows to Mac OS X and vice versa. Parallels Desktop now shares the entire Mac file structure between OS X and Windows - no more worrying about which copy of the file is the most recently updated!

* If, for some reason, you need to return to previous “Drag and Drop†implementation, just enter VM Configuration Editor, select Shared Folders and uncheck the “Enable Global Sharing for drag-and-drop†option.​

* Stability fixes – lots of segmentation fault (Parallels Desktop window closes unexpectedly) conditions are now fixed - thanks to everyone for reporting those!

* The nasty bug with Suspend/Resume and invalid windows areas handling while in Coherence is now gone.

* And many other less evident fixes…

Once again I would like to encourage you to send your bug reports to beta@parallels.com mailbox. Be it non-working USB device, a description of your Boot Camp installation that fails to boot inside Parallels Desktop box or the specific application that is not handled correctly by Coherence – we are interested in any feedback that lets us improve Parallels Desktop and deliver the best product to you!

Best regards,
Tim and the Parallels Team

 

Any chance we can get the 20-30% CPU usage with idle guest XP "feature" fixed any time soon? The battery in my macbook pro will thank you!

 

I would like to re-iterate warm congratulations to you all at Parallels and especially those working hard on the system code itself. This product is fantastic. (I am not at all a Bootcamp user) and short of some crashes after long useage timm on 3106, I have had so few issues since April 2006 and all the beta and released versions...

Now testing... First thing, on my XP VM, after installing new VM tools and rebooting, I had the warning that hardware config changed significantly. I had to re-activate. Not a big issue for me anyway, just wanted to mention it.

Short of this, both my XP VM and my Vista VM seems to run perfectly (but I have been running 3120 only for an hour or so - saw your announce on the web site before your post here).

 

I'm still seeing a massive memory leak in my VMs, same as 3106. My VM that I opened with 428 MB of memory about 5 hours ago with 3120 has now consumed 761 MB of real memory and 2.64 GB of virtual memory. It goes up another 200 KB avery 5 secs.

This is still a show stopping, data loss bug for me. I'm considering backing down to a much older version of parallels so I can actually be sure my VM wouldn't suddenly crash.

 

rufosx,

I would appreciate an extended report about the problem like rhind posted here http://forum.parallels.com/post38087-28.html

Please copy this stuff to beta@parallels.com mailbox as well.

TIA.

Best regards,
Tim

 

Can I also ask about the Parallels naming scheme? How on earth can you have a Release Candidate when there are known bugs, and quite severe ones? It can only be a release candidate if you think this version might actually be ready to go... but surely you don't since you know it has bugs?

 

Does Parallels still not work if you have more than one windows partition? While I don't need more than one while in Parallels, I do need more than one when running boot camp since I need a seperate scratch disk.

Until this is fixed, Parallels is usless to me since all windows drives show up on the Mac desktop.

john

 

Oh so that explains why I've felt like my computer is slow lately! I've been watching activity monitor and noticing the same thing but I couldn't remember if it that was abnormal. Mine's going up about 30-40kb/sec, so very similar.

I have 2gb of RAM in my MacBook, and 492mb assigned to Parallels. Virtual memory is 2GB on launch and stays around there.

 

you guys rock! now go get some sleep!

don

 

I feel like i wasted my time reporting all the bugs i found in beta 3 to forums and email, got no replies in either or and they weren't fixed in this build. :\

 

Any chance that Vista and Bootcamp will be supported before the final release? I realize it's RC now so it's probably on feature freeze, but I thought I'd ask anyway.

Thanks! Keep up the great work. Despite the inquiry, this product rocks.

 

Tim - This has been a very good release. My earlier problems that came up after the replacements of 1970 have all disappeared. Of primary interest, my full screen (1440x900) screens are back for Solaris. My Treo phone syncs perfectly in OS X. CPU temperatures are down and system resources are in the acceptable range. Too soon to know if this last will creep or stay stable but it's starting out in the black and holding. That translates to battery life and that is a good thing! And my thumb drive migrates cleanly among the various VMs perfectly. This is a little thing but it is a *big* little thing for me.

I'd like to offer a special thank you for the quality and completeness of the release announcement. We can know better what to expect and what your team is still working hard on. Kudos to you and the entire team for an ever more excellent product. It just gets better. I have to confess I have really enjoyed watching this product launch, take off, and grow. I second Don's sentiment - turn off the cell phones and take a well deserved break!

 

What is with the MASSIVE .mem file? Is this a copy of the VMs RAM? Is this also why Parallels now takes about 20 times as long to start up my VM?

I notice the VM now suspends and resumes really quickly. Is this what this .mem file enables? If so, I'd rather have an option to create this file as I don't want it, and I'd rather the machine didn't take about 5 minutes to start up in the first place.

 

I've just done an install of 3120 on a system that had Boot Camp installed and I used the Boot Camp image for the VM configuration. It seems to be working fine for me. What am I missing?

 

It's a suspended session. That is a state file of the cpu, memory, and open files, etc., at the time the session was suspended. There's also a .sav file. Not sure what that's all about yet. It may be a delta file from one session to the next. That makes me think it's on the path to snapshots. If you unsuspend it should disappear. At least it used to. I'll check - my curiosity is piqued. I too noticed the speedy suspensions compared to earlier releases. Nice, no?

Edit: I did check it and the .sav file disappeared after unsuspending the session. The .mem file lingers on. If that is what is responsible for the faster performance I'm happy with it. The .mem file is 1.5g here. Not that bad.

 

Motorola Q

The Motorola Q still does not work....... I have been hoping with each new build there would be a fix for this problem.....other than that you guys have done a GREAT job!!!!!!

 

I'm guessing you mean it fails in Windows? If that is so, then have you verified there is no agent running in OS X that would interecept the data before Windows sees it, and barring that have you used the Parallels device menu to enable it in Windows? If it works nowhere forgive my assumptions as I've not see the problem raised before.

 

I wish I knew what it was for. Suspending seems much faster but my startup time has increased substantially, and I can't help but think that creating a 1.5GB file with memory contents, config data, etc, would result in the extremely long start up time I'm seeing. I'd rather have the choice, because I rarely suspend. I usually open Windows once at the start of the day, have it running for hours, then shut it down.

If this is the cause of the slow startups then I'd prefer if I had the choice to turn it off. If it's slow startups and speedy resumes VS fast startups and slow resumes I'd take the latter option. However, I understand many would take the former, which is why I suggest this become a user-selectable option.

 

The Q has never worked in Parallels. As a mobile developer I have many many mobile devices lying around and the Q is the only one I have never got working in Parallels. Every other PDA and phone seems to work great. To be honest, the Q barely works in native Windows on any machine anyway. It's a very flaky device.

 

Build 3120 seems solid with my GNU/Linux machines so far. Most importantly, it looks like I'm no longer experiencing continuously growing memory usage. CPU utilization is lower, down to the mid 20% range rather than mid 30% range when guest is mostly idle. There is less graphic 'tearing' during rapid window scrolling and performance feels generally more reponsive. This is a very preliminary impression based on less than an hour of use, but it seems this build is more efficient than the betas, although still heavier than 1970.