which is safest most trustworthy vers of Parallels?

This thread was moved from "Installation and Configuration in Mac OS".
Alicia

I am trying Parallels again, and comparing it to VMWare's Fusion.

Which version of Parallels is most reliable and least likely to blow up in my face. I gather that 3.0 is not a great success, so should I stick with 2.5?

P.S. I already paid for both, so doesn't matter to me.

I dl'd Build 3214 and Build 5160

 

Depends on what you are doing and what are your expectations.

I have no issues with both of them, but I use them for development where my windows session is fullscreen on an exteernal monitor. I donèt use coherence often, and I never share between my windows and os x.

So for me, both have been remarquably stable.

 

I like the latest, 5160.

 

I'm now thinking of using Parallels INSTEAD OF BootCamp, which I've been using for a year or more. I need to feel sure that everything isn't ging to go up in smoke, and I felt the physical drive/partition/etc of BootCamp provided an extra margin of saftey (at least if things blew apart I'd know where and how to look for things).

Is this wrong-headed, do you think? That is, would you characterize Parallels as every bit as reliable as BootCamp Win install?

Thanks again--

 

Hi & thx for reply. Could you say WHY you prefer the latest build? Seems there's a lot of yammering about its faults on this board, and I read where some people are falling back to prior versions.

 

fbx,
I did the same thing that you did for a while, knowing if Parallels went tails up I could get the XP Repair mode running and fix up my boot file to get into the partition.

Well guess what, I screwed up ONE upgrade, back in the days I was using betas. I just rolled in a back-up all fixed.

I have found the new Parallels to be very fast and stable, my issue with my server now seems to be resolved. There is only one curious thing happening, but it probably is not Parallels fault. My USB issues with Parallels are gone too. It is at an all-time high for the preformance it has now, including a fairly low useage of OS X processing power.

Some people report Boot Camp w/ Parallels is less stable than Parallels alone. I really don't know, but it seems stable enough. If you do graphics intensive things, things are spotty.

Two things I love about NOT using the BootCamp partition are the snapshots (save a 'place' in your VMs life) and the ability to pause and suspend.

All in all, you are probably safe moving to Parallels with a .hdd alone, it seems to run quickly and stably. My stability is at an all time high, and I love the snapshots and the ability to suspend (save your state with non-mission critical apps, or just close out your apps and hit suspend)

 

I got 5160 installed and so far so good. Can't get my BootCamp install migrated (yet) as it's on another computer. Possibly I can hook them up firewire and migrate, but only if Transporter will accept BootCamp as a real machine--there's something in the manual about Transporter not being able to migrate BootCamp machines.

Anyway, I could reinstall all software and move the documents separately.
So it goes.

At the moment 5160 takes a long time to start up (2 minutes or more) and cannot see my DVD drive (I'm on a new MacBook 2.16G with 2G ram and Superdrive.

 

Hmm... Want to start a thread about your problems? That would be best.

As to Transporter, some have reported it working, although it is not officially supported.
Alternatively there are some posts outlining using SuperDuper to back-up the BootCamp partition and then setting it as a .hdd file. Just use the search (I don't have it bookmarked), if you can't find it, I'll try and dig the post up.

 

Just be careful, it has been seen that Parallels and Fusion cause each other to crash.

"Forwarned is forearmed."