Parallels Desktop for Mac

• Average user rating: 2.5 stars out of 3 reviews
• My rating: 0 stars

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• 10 stars

  work very fast and is stable.

  by jerrold2 on November 27, 2008

  Pros: Easy to switch back and forth between Windows Vista and Mac OC.

  Cons: Very hard to set up. Took Parallels tec support 4 hours to set up when given remote of my MacBook Pro. After the setup was complete everything worked better,faster and with more ease of navagation than Parallels 3.0 which I had before.

  Summary: It works as it should and I 'am very happy with it. If your computer is fast then the Parallels 4.0 works very good.

  Summary: It works as it should and I 'am very happy with it. If your computer is fast then the Parallels 4.0 works very good.

• 6 stars

  Not Suitable for all OSs

  by mac101pc101 on November 10, 2008

  Pros: This virtualization software works great if you are using to run Windows operating systems.

  Cons: Small varieties of operating systems you can run; Doesn't really work on Linux operating systems and crashes while running Linux sessions. Can only run one OS at a time.

  Summary: Parallels is a simple software and is original. On Windows operating systems, it works well in Parallels, but needs an improvement to work seemingly on Linux operating systems. Not as ...

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  Summary: Parallels is a simple software and is original. On Windows operating systems, it works well in Parallels, but needs an improvement to work seemingly on Linux operating systems. Not as polished as VMware Fusion.

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• 1 stars

  Great Promise; Abysmal delivery

  by fein7777 on July 4, 2008

  Pros: It is a brilliant idea.

  Cons: It doesn't work.

  Summary: Do not be fooled by the professional reviewers. Parallels 3 is a disaster for the average user. While they've got a lot right, the glitches are killers. My experience ...

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  Summary: Do not be fooled by the professional reviewers. Parallels 3 is a disaster for the average user. While they've got a lot right, the glitches are killers. My experience has been to put dozens of hours into attempting to get it to work correctly and finally having to abandon it due to regular crashes, difficulties using standard peripherals, and networking problems.
  
  The promise of Parallels is compelling -- to be able to run Mac and Windows programs seamlessly on a Mac. It was this assurance, backed by positive magazine reviews, that I made the ultimately disastrous mistake when my wife and I recently needed new laptops of switching from PC to Mac.
  
  For starters, Parallels is hardly easy or intuitive to set up. Phone tech support is $30 a pop (or by e-mail, where the answers are pat and do not adequately address your specific situation, and the lag time has averaged more than a week, not the promised 3 days, totally hanging me up several times). I am a relatively sophisticated user, but after exhausting every resource available to me (including paid tech support) and squandering many dozens of hours, the program still crashes my MacBook Pro or my wife's Airbook or turns the screen to gibberish (the only way out is to reboot, often losing the most recent data). We cannot get peripherals such as printers or external drives or external monitors to run reliably on both the Mac and Windows sides; same with networking, rendering the program worse than useless.
  
  I sent an earlier draft of this review to Mr. John Rhoades, Director of Operations. He informed me that "threatening Parallels with 'bad mouthing' and poor reviews is a poor way to get our attention." Fair enough. However, as I responded to him, I was not writing in the spirit of threatening, but simply "trying to determine if the program can run standard Windows programs and peripherals without undue problems, and if it can't (even though the company leads the customer to believe that it can), to responsibly warn fellow users to not expect that it can."
  
  I offered to have their tech support team show me how to work out the problems, demonstrating that the program works as advertised. They did not respond again, which I assume means that they were not confident that they could work out the problems since the mention of a negative review did get their attention. My uses are fairly standard. No 3-D games, no video editing; just Office for Windows (I like it a lot more than Office for Mac), a windows e-mail program that has no equivalent in Mac, web surfing, and a few add-ons like a good thesaurus.
  
  The current version is 3.0. My advice: wait for Ver 5, and only if they institute free tech support for the first month while you are setting it all up. Meanwhile, I am resorting to Boot Camp and the inconvenience of reboots to move between OS X and XP. Unexpected crashes and the inability to use peripherals are far more inconvenient.

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