Shoud I upgrade or wait?

R

roycewhite

Bit poster
Well now....a month ago everybody was up in arms over the 3.0 not doing what it advertised....so I waited to upgrade from 2.5. Now thing sseem to have calmed down a little, but I am still unsure. I rely (unfortunately) on the PC side for 80% of my work, so I need to do it when it is prime-time.

I have a new Macbook Pro, 2.4 Core 2 Duo with 4 GB memory, so Parallels will run 1.5 GB of memory. I run standard business programs on the PC side, Word, Excel, Outlook, FleMaker, Acrobat, etc. ALL of which I am switching over to the mac versions (I program FileMaker so I need both Mac and PC versions o support... - eventually the only thing I need PC for....).

2.5 has worked almost flawlessyly (problem connecting / seeing USB drives but te next build fixed that quickly - alebit, one of my harddrives is no longer reconizable to the system, yet the Mac sees the NTFS disc and so do other Windows PCs...).

I don't run any games (although my kids like to run them on long trips so I guess I won't do that....). So my question is...

With the setup that I have and the general use I am doing, is it safe to come out and play? I mean is it safe to upgrade to 3.0 (The reason I ask is because the upgrade is free because Parrallels released 3.0 the day after I bought 2.5). Should I even bother because everything is working for me in 2.5 (i.e. if it ain't broke....).

Please give me your thoughts and experiences - those with similar use and setup...

Thanks!

Royce
DATADISC, INC.
CD/DVD Manufacturing
"Fastest turn on the Web"
 
Hi,

I'm one of the ones who is running 3.0 successfully, including updating my Quest GPS correctly. I do not have any sharing enabled between my windows and my mac, and I do not use coherence. I have also disabled my windows XP sound because I don't care about having sound in my windows.

I have even disabled all eye candy in windows XP to make sure my VM does not loose time on some eye-candy.

I have 1 external monitor connected on my laptop, and I run the XP in a full screen on that monitor (1280x1024).

It works beautifully for me.
 
I also am running 3.0 successfully with a bootcamp partition on my macbook pro. I only use windows xp for office apps and quickbooks, so it's not to task intensive. I haven't tried any gaming or features like that, but haven't had any trouble with parallels. The 3.0 upgrade seems to handle USB devices much better and I appreciate the abilities that are provided by the 'smart select' feature. I am hoping for the ability to use dual monitors within windows xp so that I can use some projection software in windows. Anyway, that's my thoughts. Your mileage may vary...
 
I have rolled back from 3.0 to 2.5. I'd recommend that you stay with 2.5 for now if it works for you.

My Windows VM is just for business apps--I use it to run Quickbooks and a scanner application. 2.5 works great. I have no issues and it runs at native speed.

When I upgraded to 3.0, everything still worked, but Parallels became unstable. Sometimes crashed, sometime locked up. The VM ran slower. Also 3.0 introduced all sorts of "co-mingling" between Windows in the VM and OS X. I don't really want Windows to be aware of OS X or have access to anything on the Macintosh volume.

Based on those issues, I moved back to 2.5 and am very happy there for the time being.

Shepherdboy
 
roycewhite said:
I rely (unfortunately) on the PC side for 80% of my work, so I need to do it when it is prime-time.

I have a new Macbook Pro, 2.4 Core 2 Duo with 4 GB memory, so Parallels will run 1.5 GB of memory. I run standard business programs on the PC side, Word, Excel, Outlook, FleMaker, Acrobat, etc. [/I]
Click to expand...

Like you I use my MacBook Pro for my business. I see no burning reason to upgrade from 2.5, which has been very stable for me. There are on the other hand many risks in the upgrade, not the least of which may be a large outlay of time in fiddling with it, so I am waiting until either 3.0 is largely bug-free and/or there is some new feature I can't live without.

David
 
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