Their uninstall icon sums up my feelings quite well. Their support is horrible, the forums are filled with people complaining and even their phone system is a joke; the IVR has a computer reading the name – Para-lel-ells – instead of a person.
The real deal breaker is the sticky keys bug. Which ever the CMD key is mapped in a Windows VM doesn't work right. If you map CMD to ALT, Alt+Tab will 'stick'. If you map CMD to WIN, modifier keys like WIN+D don't work right.
This bug with sticky keys was introduced a couple years ago when Parallels Desktop 4 was released, and still exists with v5.
Maybe VMware Fusion is slower1, but VMware does virtualization right. I trust close to 90% of my servers to ESX/vSphere, and I'll continue to trust my desktop virtualization to Fusion. On a Windows desktop it's not even a question, VMware Workstation has no competition.
- Fusion 3.1 RC is in public beta, so the MacTech benchmarks are already outdated [back]
Tags: Parallels, Virtualization, VMware
May 11th, 2010 at 7:57 am
Maybe I was just paranoid but I stopped using Parallels when they moved all their operations off-shore. Coincidentally, that's about when complaints started to rise on their forums…
You should really check out VirtualBox, though. Its grown by leaps and bounds over the past few years. Well, that is, if it can handle your stringent mousing requirements ;)