Submitted by “Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac launched today with a number of new features and refinements for users looking to run alternative operating systems in virtual environments on their Macs. As summarized on Parallels’ site, the update brings enhancements to gaming and graphics, simpler setup and integration, greater manageability and mobility, and better performance. Beyond improvements to the standard Parallels Desktop application for Mac OS X, the company has also released a new, free iOS application, Parallels Mobile, bringing remote access on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch to users running the desktop software.”
Parallels 3 was good. Parallels 4 and 5 were dogs. Painfully slow. Finally, they’ve managed to deal with most of the regressions in Parallels 6.
The problem with Parallels 6 is that it’s a massive memory hog. I thought that giving the VM half of my 3 gigs of RAM would work out well. But Parallels takes up way more than that AND it locks down the VM’s RAM so it isn’t swappable. The result is that Parallels itself performs well, but everything else thrashes, because there isn’t enough free memory left. And then as a result, Parallels slows down because although it’s got the CPU, disk access has to compete with swapping.
I backed down the VM to 1 gig, and it’s acceptable. It’s still constricting, but at least I can now use Safari and Parallels at the same time. Also, if the VM is going to swap pages, it’s better to let Windows decide what to swap out (to the virtual disk) than to let MacOS swap out something random that might be critical to VM performance.
Agreed, I wished I’d stayed on 3 but paid to upgrade to 4. I saw no advantage but thought the UI had got worse and one VM corrupted it’s HDD file and I lost everything. That never happened under 3.
I didn’t bother upgrading to 5 and don’t think I’ll bother with 6 either.
It annoys me every time they make a release it’s supposed to be 30 or 40% faster than the previous one. If that was the case it would be faster than physical hardware by now!
What are you talking about guys?
I’ve used PD3 for a long time and it was much slower! The only thing it did fast enough for me was XP VM boot, all other operations are much slower then PD5.
And on W7 it totally sucks.
Try disabling all Mac/Win integration features, maybe it will help but even with integration it’s so way faster.
I actually had my Windows 7 Windows Experience Scores drop several points in 3d graphics categories when upgrading from Paralllels 5 to 6!? Real world performance still seems okay though.
The best new feature of Parallels 6 is that after many MANY years, I can now turn on the advanced desktop graphic features in Ubuntu! I don’t know whether there are finally 3D graphics drivers or what is going on, but this is great.
No such luck for me with OpenSUSE 11.3 x64 with KDE 4.5.1
Not worth the money they’re asking.
I’m paying that much each year for upgrades along the line of “hey, it’s now like it should have been in the first place!â€.
Anyone reading this, could you please send me a screenshot of the massive upgrade ad that’s appearing when you run Parallels 5—I dismissed it and can’t get it back, but want a picture of it for use in an article.
This one?
http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/3923/screenshot20100915at630.png
I thought that it wouldn’t display it after 9/14, since it was a “Special prerelease offer for their favorite customer, me”. I was wrong.
Thanks very much for doing that. I’m shocked at how little sanctity there is in software (especially paid) now. When you buy a product, you don’t expect it to come with adverts and to snoop on you.
I downloaded Parallels 5 trial two days ago as VirtualBox 3.2 is bloody awful and slow on my MBP4,1 with Snow Leopard and I’ve lost my licence key for VMWare 2 in a house move.
Parallels 5 wouldn’t play nicely with OpenSUSE 11.3 x64 so when I saw Paralells 6 was released yesterday I downloaded the trial and upgraded it.
It felt a bit faster than v5 even before installing the Parallels Tools but much faster once they were installed.
So far I prefer it to VirtualBox but it lacks the polish of VMWare.
After Parallels 3 failed in so many interesting ways, I switched to VMware. It costs the same and the company seems to have a tighter lock on enterprise virtualization.
More importantly they seem to have a better track record of treating bug fixes as something I shouldn’t have to pay for.
Edited 2010-09-16 17:18 UTC