The IT Nerd

I got a press release from Parallels this morning announcing Parallels Desktop Switch To Mac Edition. In a nutshell, here’s what it does:

• It includes two hours of interactive videos that help PC users learn the Mac platform. I’m sure that the geniuses at your local Apple Store are overjoyed to hear that.
• When you’re ready to switch, an included USB cable and a piece of software called Enhanced Parallels Transporter will move the entire PC (licensed operating system, applications, files and data) to the new Mac.
• Parallels Desktop 4.0 then takes the contents of the PC that you just migrated and lets you run it as a virtual machine.

It sounds slick and is worth considering if you are moving from PC to Mac. It’s also cheap. It’s $100 US and available today.

I’d love to try this out and move my wife from her WinXP box to a Mac. Any chance you can hook me up Parallels?

A new build of Parallels Desktop 4.0 is now available for users to download. The release notes are here, but here are the key highlights:

• Improved 3D graphics in Windows virtual machines.
• Problems with Palm synchronization in Windows virtual machines – fixed.
• Random disconnection of USB 1.1 devices in Linux virtual machines – fixed.
• Invisibility of the text mouse pointer on black background in Windows virtual machines – fixed.
• Problems with SMB shares in native Windows Boot Camp installations that have Parallels Tools installed – fixed.
• Problems with Shared Networking on Snow Leopard host computers – fixed.

Strangely, it didn’t show up in the updating utility that is part of the application. I only tripped over it by accident yesterday. But that didn’t matter to me as I normally download the full installer and then I normally do a uninstall and reinstall of the software. Usually that avoids issues, but this time I ran into this issue that others have posted about on the Parallels message boards.  I didn’t use any of their suggestions to solve it. I instead followed this Parallels knowledgebase document to solve the problem. Once I got past that, I was able to update my VM’s and go to town.

Overall it doesn’t “feel” faster, but I haven’t had the chance to really push it yet. That’s something I plan on doing tonight. If you’ve tried this build, leave a comment with your impressions.

I just got a tip from a beta tester of Parallels who received an e-mail from the company asking him to submit a review of Parallels Desktop 4 on the Apple Store and Amazon.com:

Thank you for your recent comments and suggestions to the Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac Beta Program Survey. Your invaluable feedback helps us better meet the needs of our customers by improving future versions of our products.

Submit a Review
Why not take your feedback experience further by sharing your experiences with the online Apple community? By submitting a product review at Amazon.com or Apple Store (Online), potential users can take advantage of an unbiased online resource to assist them in making a purchasing decision.

While this isn’t the sort of thing that Belkin has been caught doing in the past, one has to wonder if this can be considered distasteful. Consider this: Parallels is trying to get people who have a positive bias towards Parallels desktop to write reviews that help to alter the perception of the software in the minds of end users. If you take into consideration that Parallels Desktop 4 has had some rather negative press on a variety of fronts that likely affects how the product is perceived by end users, this might be seen as an attempt as trying to spin doctor things in their favor.

What do you think? Is Parallels doing something wrong, or are they justified in doing this? Please leave a comment with your thoughts. Oh, if anybody from Parallels wants to comment about this, feel free to do so. I’d love to hear your side of the story.

A new version of Parallels Desktop For Mac appeared on it’s website today. According to the release notes, it promises substantial bug fixes and improvements over their last release including:

• DirectX 9.0 with Shaders Model 2 support
• Windows 7 inside the virtual machine (experimental)
• Apple remote disk support
• SSE4 support (better performance for media applications)
• General performance improvements.
• Improved USB support (performance, USB1.1 compatibility fixes).

Given that Parallels has been the target of critics who have accused the company of releasing beta code as well as buggy software to its users which has forced their CEO to fight back against these charges, one hopes that this release will put an end to this noise once and for all.

I have not installed this release yet, but I plan to later today when I get some time to do this. If you you’ve tried this release and have some feedback on it, please leave a comment and let us know what you think. I will try to monitor things in cyberspace just in case something “interesting” appears.

UPDATE: Parallels has a press release on their site about this. Mentioned in this press release is this:

Customer Experience Program
Ensure Parallels continues to meet your needs by providing information on your use priorities and preferences. Customers choose to opt in or out at installation and can fully control their settings through the configuration editor.

I’ll have to install this to see what this means for end users.

UPDATE #2: I just installed it. No issues so far. Here’s what the Customer Experience Program means for users:

If you choose to participate, Parallels will automatically start to collect anonymous information about your hardware configuration and the way you use Parallels Desktop. Using this information, Parallels can learn how to improve Parallels Desktop and the features you use more often.

So they’re doing what Microsoft has done for a while. Intersting. I’m guessing that it comes out of the issues that may have existed with Parallels Desktop 4 and how it was handled.

Oh yeah, it does seem a tad bit faster overall. But USB speed is clearly faster than their previous release.

Yes, I know that the title isn’t grammatically correct, but I wanted to use Serguei Beloussov (Parallels’ chief executive) exact quote. Basically, in this ComputerWorld article, he says that Parallels Desktop 4 is a quality product and that a “Couple Of Dozen” users who frequent the company sponsored support forums are giving the world the impression that it’s not:

Beloussov maintained that it was a very small group — “a couple of dozen,” he said during the interview — who are posting negative comments about the upgrade on the company’s support forums. “It’s actually quite a small number who are getting upset,” he argued. “I have engineers coming to me who are asking ‘Why do we get this reaction? There are only a few people making noise, and there are no real problems, only problems of perception.'”

“Happy customers don’t go to forums,” Beloussov maintained. “And lots of [problems reported in the forum] have been resolved in Desktop 4.”

Now that’s 100% true. Happy customers just use a product and don’t say a word. Customers with problems scream from the rooftops. That’s true for any product. I’ll also note that Parallels doesn’t censor its support forums like Apple has been known to do:

“We do not moderate our support forums,” Serguei Beloussov, Parallels’ chief executive, said on Tuesday, referring to the practice of monitoring, and sometimes purging, user comments. “We became a victim of our own open policy.”

I’ll applaud them for not zapping negative comments as it takes balls to stand up there and take shots like that. But I think they need to do more. I think they need to do what Comcast has done and reach out to disgruntled users and fix their issues. I also think that they need to adequately explain the fact that a pre-release version of the software might have slipped out to users. Plus in general, they need to increase their customer service efforts generally as you have to pay money to talk to a live human being, which is a big deterrent in terms of dealing with issues from an end user perspective.

The fact is that from where I sit, this release does everything it claims to. It’s faster and more stable than the previous version. Plus the graphics support is better. I really think Parallels has a winner here. But if they don’t get a handle on what the public perceives, then they might as well hand over this market to VMWare.

The Register is reporting that Parallels might have shipped pre-release code in boxed versions of Parallels Desktop 4:

“On the launch day, November 11, boxed software buyers received PD4 build 3047, dated October 16 2008, whereas customers downloading the software from Parallels’ website received build 3522 dated November 8 2008.”

That’s not a minor difference from where I sit. But a Parallels sock puppet spokesperson said the following:

Jenny Ellis, world-wide communications director for Parallels, said: “The version of Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac that was shipped in the boxes was absolutely market-ready … Whilst the version that launched in boxes and the version that’s available online were different, it is not the case that one was a pre-release version, or was in any way less ready for customers. Both completed the acceptance testing process and both are fully supported by Parallels.”

Gee. That sounds like a wee bit of spin to me. I’ve worked in software development environments in the past, and this explanation sounds really disingenuous. You may want to consider the following as well:

Parallels Desktop’s build history includes the first release candidate, build 3035, and the second release candidate, build 3051.

The boxed software, build 3047, would sequentially fit between the two release candidates. Bugs in build 3047 could be reasonably expected to have been fixed in later builds of the software.

This would explain a lot of things. As I said when I first posted this story, I have had no issues with Parallels Deskotp 4. That’s because I’ve been using builds 3522 and 3540 which I downloaded from the Parallels site. That makes this story completely plausible from where I sit.

So, I would recommend the following if you have issues with Parallels Desktop 4 and you’re using something other than builds 3522 and 3540. Download the latest version and do an uninstall and reinstall of Parallels Desktop 4. DO NOT UPGRADE an existing install of Parallels Desktop. Then update the Parallels Tools on your virtual machines. I suspect that this might solve some of the issues that people have been complaining about.

Parallels Desktop 4 has been out for a couple of weeks now and has already had one major update, but that that hasn’t stopped users from being ticked off at the company. Threads like this one have sprung up on their support forum with angry users proclaming VMWare Fusion’s superiority. Other threads like this one have users asking for their money back. But there is a large list of threads describing a variety of issues including slow speeds and upgrade issues.

Now, I have been using Parallels Desktop 4 and I have not seen any of this myself. In fact I have found this release to be a bit faster than version 3 as well as being more stable. Plus I uninstall and reinstall the application every time I upgrade which from previous experience helps to avoid issues. So maybe that’s why I have no issues. Or perhaps I am just lucky?

In any case, I’d love to have Parallels respond to this. Perhaps someone from the company would be kind enough to leave a comment or send me an e-mail explaining their side of the story. If I hear from them, I’ll post whatever they send me in an update.

In the meantime, VMWare must be enjoying this.

If you pay a vist to the Parallels website today, you’ll notice that the latest version of Parallels Desktop has shipped. I’ve been using it for a while and I have some early impressions of the software:

• It has much better graphics support than version 3.0. I can now run games and apps that use DirectX 9 and OpenGL 2.0. However, I can’t use the Aero interface graphics with Vista. But that’s not a big deal as the last time I checked, VMWare Fusion can’t use Aero either. Besides, I turn off the Vista Aero nonsense as it really doesn’t add to my user experience. I should note that you can allocate more video RAM to the VM (I have mine set to 128MB but you can do more than that) which also helps with graphics performance.
• There’s a new feature called Adaptive Hypervisor which allows Parallels to load balance between the Mac operating system and a VM. I experimented with this for a bit before turning it off. But while I did have it on, it did make a difference in terms of how the VM and the Mac performed.
• Parallels Desktop for Mac 4.0 supports up to eight CPUs and 8GB RAM to each VM (up from one CPU and 2GB of RAM). That’s great if you have a Mac Pro on your desk and a ton of RAM to spare. I have a MacBook Pro that tops out at 4GB of RAM so that feature doesn’t make a difference for me.
• It is faster than 3.0 by a big margin. It is now competitive with VMWare Fusion from what I can tell. However VMWare Fusion still has the edge in terms of speed for now though.
• For those of you who want to run OS X Server, it does that too. I didn’t test that myself as I don’t have a OS X Server license floating around. If anybody else has tested this feature, please leave me a comment and let me know what you think.
• There’s 64-bit OS support in this version. I didn’t have the ability to test that though. Perhaps someone who uses this feature will leave a comment.

So does VMWare have a reason to worry? In my opinion, yes. I run Parallels Desktop mostly for the USB support as it has always been better than VMWare Fusion. But I have always wished for more speed because VMWare Fusion absolutely crushed Parallels Desktop 3.0 in terms of speed. This latest release closes the gap. Hopefully future updates will continue to close the gap further.

There’s also a ton of new features that I didn’t touch on. Such as remotely accessing a Windows virtual machine from an iPhone, a “Safe Mode” function that was likely “borrowed” from Microsoft Virtual PC which gives you the option to discard changes to the VM after it is shut down, and automatic snapshots which save the state of the VM at pre-determined intervals. There’s speech recognition in this version as well. Finally it includes 1 year’s worth of Windows Internet security software by Kaspersky and Acronis True Image Home as well as Acronis Disk Director Suite.

So if you’re looking for a way to run Windows on your Mac, take a look at Parallels Desktop 4. It’s a serious contender in this market.