I am decidedly unimpressed with Parallels 3.0. In fact, I would almost call it completely non-functional and a fraud except that I have been able to install Ubuntu 6.10. However, it’s completely unable to manage Windows 2000 as advertised. The install repeatedly and reproducibly hangs with a spinning beach ball of death. Sometimes I can’t even Force Quit parallels. Even kill -9 failed once, and I had to reboot to get rid of it. Installing Windows NT 4.0 got a little further and at least did not create a spinning beach ball of death. However it still failed:
Furthermore, attempts to report these problems hit any number of bugs ranging from choosing the wrong e-mail program (not everyone uses Apple Mail) to server errors when I try to submit the bugs via their web site:
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, webadmin@parallels.com and inform them of the time the error occurred,
and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/1.3.33 Server at backend.parallels.com Port 80
And that’s just the serious flaws. There are numerous other glitches and inconsistencies in both the program and their web site that tell me these folks really don’t understand the Mac: meaningless icons without any tooltips, cancel buttons that quit the application, and more. For instance, they refer to the “alt” key instead of the option key, and assume the hard drive is always named “Macintosh HD”. They also require a complicated 20-digit serial number that mixes zeroes and O’s and ones and I’s to install the program or get technical support. Worst of all, once you’ve installed the program, the serial number is not available anywhere obvious. You have to dig out the box to find it again.
I suppose I should just admire the dancing bear; but damn it, it dances so poorly! Parallels is clearly not even remotely an adequate replacement for a real Windows box, not even for occasional use of one or two programs. :-( I probably should have bought VMWare Fusion instead.
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