Goodbye, Parallels
Sep 11, 08:37 AM by Eric Allen
I’ve been a happy user of Parallels Desktop for over a year now. A few weeks ago, though, things went south. My Windows XP virtual machine started randomly pegging my CPU for no good reason. It slowed down to a crawl and had to be rebooted. This went on for some time, so I decided to start fresh. I tried to set up a fresh VM, and half way through the install bam, a kernel panic. I tried again to no avail. I tried a different XP image. Same thing. I finally broke down and contacted the oh-so-helpful Parallels tech support. They told me reinstalling Parallels would fix the problem. It didn’t, so I went back to them with yet another panic.log. They gave me a great idea: format my computer and rebuild from scratch. Yeah. So just because their software is misbehaving I need to sacrifice a couple of days of my life to rebuild my computer.
The good news is that this is a competitive marketplace, and VMWare Fusion has reached 1.0. During all of this trouble I downloaded the trial, and had XP up and running within 20 minutes. The virtual machine definitely felt snappier than Parallels, and Fusion has all the features I would want. Since Parallels wanted to charge me another $60 for 3.0 (which catches up to Fusion), the choice was simple: Goodbye Parallels, hello Fusion.
