Parallels 4 not ready for prime time

[tholius]

I eagerly awaited the release of P4, because I had problems
with P3 -- mostly cured by turning off the sound. The
sound on in P3 caused regular crashes.

P4 crashed twice during the install, and finally I had XP
launched and parallels tools installed. Of course, it crashed
a few minutes later and then would not let windows get
past the login screen where it crashed, even in safe mode.
After a few of those, it could no longer find the hard drive.
So I tried reverting to an older snapshot, which crashed
immediately. Now I'm reverting back to P3. Wasted a day
on this one... upgrading (into uselessness?) the P3 virtual
machines takes several hours. Enjoy. This one gets an "F"

 

[JNB]

Ugh. I hate it when new versions create headaches like that. VMWare's been mostly rock-solid, but since upgrading to 2.0 I'm having a few delays when first launching and reading the VM Library. Other than that, it's been great.

 

[Spiffey]

Definitely - hold fire until they've sorted all the issues out. Their forums are absolutely full of irate customers having no end of problems.

My problem was quite unusual - aside from being slower than version 3 (despite a significant speed increase being promised in the blurb), version 4 managed to stop Windows XP Professional SP3 from copying and pasting anything - in any program …

 

[crazzyeddie]

I just setup Parallels 4 last night with XP SP3 and Boot Camp... it worked without a hitch.

 

[jbg232]

I remember when I installed Parallels 3 when it came out it was a nightmare, so much so that I lost 2 full weekends trying to get the thing installed correctly to no avail and finally had to return it. I went with VMware fusion and couldn't be happier. So +1 for waiting until parallels has had time to mature if you are going the parallels route.