Or can try free one virtualbox or Veertu desktop free too but no Mac OS guest yet. Aw21 Jan 29 When trying to launch the VMs some of them start with "Preparing Automatic Repair" and other just present a black screen.
Trying to repair the disks was not successful. I had to restore the VMs from backups. This looks like a fatal bug to me as it results in data loss. I've posted this on the Parallels forum but got not response. Any reason we're not seeing current updates here anymore? Macpenguin Nov 24 This is simply the most outrageous update EVER! They already showed their greed when MacOsX But this is simply going much to far I will NOT do that I would urge people to try the competitors One is even FREE!
Macbookpro Nov 13 Ervins Strauhmanis Sep 15 I have Parallels Desktop Pro 12, which was won in a prize draw. I thought that I'd be getting a standard non-Pro version, and I was disappointed that I got a professional version instead. Why would I be frustrated in getting a more advanced edition, you might ask, it is because the app will stop to function within a year, as I discovered when I registered serial number on Parallels website. I want to upgrade apps at a pace of my own choosing and as such, I will not even install the app, as to not to get locked out when the time is up.
Technically it is a great peace of software, it's a pity that stance on customers blows it all away, for me at least. I now wait until it is bundled with a few other apps or offered as a special on MU before buying it. Not sure if I'll be upgrading to v12, however, as v11 in conjunction with Windows 10 is working well on my mid iMac OhEssex Aug 26 When I see Parallels appear in the daily MacUpdate listings it shows as 3.
When I click on it in the listings I go to the Parallels page, where it shows at the top as half a star. Can we have a little more consistency here.
What do the 3 different star ratings mean? I know that for many years now Parallels have been hosing their customers and I think the reviews that imply a rating over lifetime need to culled down to something like maybe 3 years. Just because every man and his dog thought Parallels was awesome back when it first came out and there wasn't really anything like it at the time bears no reflection at all on what seasoned users think of it today after how they've been treated by Parallels.
Derekcurrie Aug 26 No DirectX 10 support in sight. Same old 'wait and see' response from Parallels when asked about this now ancient holdup. Can't play modern 3D games. MacSpanner Aug 26 I'm a long time user and tried going to 12 but had to quickly revert to I'm sure it will get resolved in a while but at the moment v12 is unusably buggy in many ways.
Go read the Parallels forums and you'll get an idea. Fiver starts when it's good but right now If you're running Win 8. I've been told by Parallels support today that they're working on a workaround, but be sure they've fixed it before you kill your Win 10 license. They said "We apologize for the inconvenience, but this issue is caused by Windows 10 activation policies: the activation key is bounded to the hardware and as the virtual machine emulates hardware it differs from the real one reasonably enough.
You're not the only one facing this issue and our Development team already works upon a workaround for this issue, but you should understand that it is a Windows licensing issue, not the Parallels one. It's a Parallels issue because they claim you can run Windows in their Virtual Machine, and now you can't! Personally, I'm leaving them completely after it took me 48 hours of support calls before they 'fessed up that that they knew they had a problem.
I'll try something else. Rikyman Jul 12 I was a parallels suporter, but the new licencing is no go, it's not an upgrade but a big downgrade, there are better less ripping user software, I have moved do VMWare, after this.
By the price of this software you can buy an infocus kangaroo and have a Windows machine allways with you. Toosit Jul 5 Version 11 is a rip off because it's basically version 10 minus version 11's pro features.
Why on earth would I buy a downgraded version or pay an annual subscription to get same old features!? I will be using my old version 10 which is great! I am still using v8 with OSX As long it does, I will not update for sure. The license scheme is just plain -How to ripping off people every year-.
Akwarner May 10 Sperling Mar 31 It's expensive crap. I've nothing to apologize for. Parallels is expensive crap. No way Parallels there is replacement and I am happily using it!
If you'd provide your piece of SW for reasonable price - I'd maybe consider. That half star as rating is more than generous. And yes, you're too greedy.
So when I criticized MacUpdate for this update to Parallels being f ive weeks late in being posted here they deleted my post within a coupe of hours. Says a lot about them Wonder how soon this will be removed Mastcell Mar 31 I got an email from MacUpdate that goes like this What is the meaning of the word 'Perpetual'.
Does this means there is no need to fork out for future upgrades ever? Or is this a misprint? Donmontalvo Mar 24 Derekcurrie Jan 20 I've had minimal problems with Parallels 11 for my purposes. It is an improvement over v10 IMHO. Note that WINE is no better. That knocks them all out as able to play the most recent 3D games. The problem is bothering to code the translators to allow use of the GPU hardware on the Mac. I consider this a dead end issue. Pablo2k Dec 5 I finally had enough with Parallels version I thought Great, I can activate and deactivate some Parallels with my Parallels account As Microsoft beautifully do it with Office If something fails you have to call them to reset you install counter one ONE!!
In addition Parallels 11 fails to update Windows 10 when there is a new release. Then it rolls back the failed Win 10 installation. So today I used the cross grade offer from a competitor, even if it has slightly lower 3D performance it is allowed to have it installed on my iMac, Mac Pro and Mac Book in addition to it being more stable. But I cannot support these practices.
So goodbye Parallels, hope to see you again when you clean up your business practices and fix your instability. Mikael-B Dec 1 I decided to abandon Parallels now after being told I should be able use the PD11 trial side by side with my older PD8 installation.
At no point during installation am I Informed that the PD11 Trial will delete my older installation, but that is of course the end result. The sales support were nice and helpful, but I got enough of such schemes. I don't fully understand the crticism of the yearly fees as that is optional. Cross-grading to Fusion is my next step.
Mcr Nov 12 Fusion v 7 closed the speed gap, and now Fusion 8 and PD 11 are for the most part neck and neck. With the new licensing policy of PD, it just makes it easier to switch to Fusion knowing that you are also no longer sacrificing functionality or performance in doing so. I used PD and Fusion both from their inception. This app has been updated.
OhEssex Oct 12 So, in addition to my work laptop, I go to install Parallels on my home machine something previously allowable given that nobody has figured out how to be in two places at the same time yet.
I was in a hurry preparing for something and I just had to bite the bullet and buy another my very last copy. I despise this company. The software they have may be good, but I'm certain their CEO is both an analyst and a therapist! Borisd Oct 6 I can't afford it. So I am forced to look for a better option.
Not wise, Parallells. Good bye! Sir Sep 30 Parallels has forced a change in licensing, our University can not buy a perpetual licence, we must now pay a 12 month "rent" for it. Its incredibly easy to loose a customer, and once they have shifted, its incredibly difficult to ever get them back.
Mcr Sep 28 So I've been playing with PD 11 and Fusion 8 for the last month now i've been a long time user of both products for many years, and use both professionally and personally. My observations your mileage may vary, this is just me is that on older hardware, PD 11 is slower than PD 10 on the same setup, where as Fusion 8 is faster than Fusion 7 on the same older hardware old in this case is Core2 Duo macs, not Macs with i series CPUs.
On newer hardware i5's and i7's , I don't notice a difference between Fusion 8 and PD 11 I don't use for gaming, so not commenting on graphics, just business apps performance. Note this is coming from someone who has used PD primarily for his personally work the last several years, mainly just out of laziness and not wanting to spend time migrating all my VMs fusion. But now I'm switching over for personal stuff, professionally, still using both, as clients and co-workers have a vested interest in sticking with what they have.
Derekcurrie Sep 4 They suggest signing up and watching their email list for notification of when they finally catch up. I'm waiting on updating to version 11 until they, at last, get this together. There is no sign of VMware supporting DirectX Mcr Aug 24 Windows 8 and higher, no issues.
There was no built in USB 3 drivers in Windows 7. Parallels found a way around that; and wrote virtualized drivers. Bottom line, do your research. Grass is not necessarily greener on the other side. From a licensing perspective, i had no issues with PD through version 10, but the new PD 11 user license does have me thinking if the slightly faster speed of running Windows over Fusion is worth all the new limitations in the PD 11 user license.
ChristianPrudHomme Aug 24 Bad faith: Moving Basic features to the Pro edition because "Parallel found out that basic features were well enough for users". Virtualization for Linux guests, both available in the basic Parallels last year, are now restricted to Pro version only.
Tired of being milked away Masterminter Aug 23 Awful license scheme is holding me back buying. Although I've been a loyal Parallels customer since version 5 and find the software actually quite good, I can no longer recommend it.
There is no option for reduced-price extra seats for the Pro version. These abhorrent and customer-hostile license terms are so restrictive, and the lack of any understanding or flexibility on the part of their support team, mean that I have begun the process of moving everything over to VMWare, with excellent performance, unlimited multi-seat licenses for individuals and a crossgrade offer for Parallels customers.
I'll vote with my wallet, and with this well-deserve half-star for a product-destroying licensing policy. Goodbye Parallels. Not at all impressed. A while ago, VMware offered a sidegrade for users of Parallels Desktop to get the latest version of Fusion for about ten bucks; hopefully they'll offer something similar in the future.
After having versions 4, 6, and 7 and having them all stop working on me after a few OS X updates , I'm done with Parallels. SegN3rd Aug 21 Besides my feelings about Parallels' business practices, the fact is that the cost of Parallels plus a license of Windows 10 now costs as much as just buying an HP Stream or a similar competing product.
I know these low-end netbooks aren't as powerful as your Mac, but they also allow you to run Windows without affecting your Mac in any way or using any of its resources, plus they are quite portable. If you find a good enough sale, you can buy Windows-running hardware for less than the cost of Windows-running software.
OhEssex Aug 19 This reminds me of the origin of the expression "daylight robbery" where property taxes were assessed by the number of windows a house had. Mcr Aug 8 There are many posts on the Net about how to install El Capitan beta into Parallels v And bear in mind the following, you've been told: 1 the method only works with the Developer Preview of You can leave it off or turn it back after PT is installed, but it must be off to install PT. It is very clear after all my experimenting with the various methods to install Heck , even between the Developer Preview and Public Beta of Parallels is going to need to make some major adjustments to support painless install of In anticipation of all the bemoaning about another Parallels 'forced' upgrade to support El Capitan, just keep that in mind that the devs are simply having to keep up with Apple, which continues its history of making MAJOR system level and core changes in OS X with every release since Lion, Not just the boot and installing functions, but the graphics engines, audio, video, hardware abstraction and so on.
Parallels is not TextEdit, it's very sophisticated software engineering, that takes development resources to maintain and test, every time Apple makes sweeping changes across the board, all of which comes with a cost. It is not as simple as just changing the 'supported version of OS X' from Even the video subsystem in El Cap seems to have been reworked again by Apple. Screen drawing with Yosemite virtual machine in PD, is slower than in Mavericks, but had improved in the latest PD With El Cap, using the same video driver in Parallels Tools for Yosemite, the screen drawing is very glitchy, and slow, like it was with early Yosemite betas.
Regardless, testing El Cap in a VM is nice. I have El Cap installed natively as well on a partition, but this saves from rebooting between El Cap and my every day configuration. Bobebop Aug 1 Serial key does not work, webhelp is "down". I am so tired of this. Noraa Jul 29 Parallels drives me crazy. On the one hand, it is stable, feature rich, and fast. On the other hand, its licensing as absolutely abhorrent. While previous versions do tend to continue to work on newer OS v.
Add to the fact that it's nearly impossible to deactivate a computer once activate installed Parallels on a MacBook Air, activated, a few months later sold the Air and bought a Pro, couldn't get Parallels to activate since it claimed the code was already in use - took days with Parallels support to get the issue resolved , the licensing system is just terrible. Now that Windows 10 is out, and it seems to not completely suck, I am hopeful that I can now ditch Parallels and it's absurd licensing practices for a more sane company in VMWare well, licensing sane, lack of USB 3 support is pretty insane Fvdg Jul 29 Will NOT allow the update to Windows 10!
Derekcurrie Jul 26 Again, it's a messy update. This is not good. Icons on your desktop will be a mess. You may get a screwy screen resolution, although mine reset itself back to normal. IOW: Updates like this are geek worthy. We're used to stuff going wrong all the time. But granny will have a FIT. They have to do better. Reelstuff Jul 25 I have been a paid user since version 3 through version 6, Now I can't even use the software, MAC isolated the software as a "Problem Child" now I just have to wonder, what value is this product when every time you turn around you have to pay an "upgrade" fee?
I see this as a seriously flawed and destructive business model that will certainly come back around, Karma is a female dog I am sick and tired of the nickel and dime failed business model I am moving to another platform that performs better and actually works when my operating system updates.
Were mainly talking about 32 bit versus 64 bit here, so really this is a failure on the part of this product and while you may have my money you will never have me as a customer again.
B-Jefferson-Le-Blanc Jun 25 I have to give Parallels high marks this time around. I had been putting off upgrading because, frankly, I don't need it yet.
I couldn't pass that up either. I hadn't upgraded Toast since version 8. While 8 still works in Mavericks, I thought this was the best price I'd ever be likely to find on a Toast upgrade. As it turns out, the one I got, version 12, isn't the latest — version 14 was just released — but it's still four versions newer than the one I was using.
What really got me posting here was the ease with which I was able to create a Windows 7 virtual machine in Parallels 10 by converting my VMWare Fusion Windows 7 virtual machine; the process left the Fusion virtual machine undisturbed.
It went as smooth as you-know-what through a goose. I didn't even know it would be possible. I had been worried about installing Windows 7 in Parallels given that I am already using my Windows 7 license in Fusion — Microsoft licensing policies set the standard for being difficult to deal with I have been running Windows XP in Parallels.
That, too, was not disturbed. But there were no issues when I started up Windows 7 in Parallels 10 - though it took me awhile to get the settings where I want them. And Parallels started up in Coherence mode by default, which was a nuisance till I figured out what was going on and turned Coherence off. Very thoughtful.
And yes, I have the requisite Windows 7 license to qualify for the free Windows 10 offer. In the meantime, I've skipped Windows 8 altogether because, in my opinion, it's more trouble than it's worth. Windows 10 should be a lot easier to deal with. You may be asking, why am I using both Parallels and Fusion? Well, I bought Parallels at an introductory discount when it first came out.
But a version or two on it became unreliable so I decided to give VMWare Fusion a try, also at an introductory discount. I moved that to Windows 7 because Win 7 couldn't easily be installed over XP. Now, of course, I could put Win 10 in either program.
Maybe I'll toss a coin. Nowadays I could run all my VMs in either app, but they keep leapfrogging one another in feature development so I've never been able to decide to stick with one or the other.
And my early experience with Parallels made me wary of putting all my eggs in one basket. They've both gone haywire at one time or another. So, for now, I'll give Parallels 10 five stars. Cowicide Jun 2 MacUpdate, this is up to version Mcr Apr 3 YMMV, but I've seen a noticeable improvement in speed and 'snappiness' with the With the Windows 7 VM, which is also installed on Bootcamp on the same machine, it feels virtually native in terms of response.
Derekcurrie Apr 1 Stick with the previous version until Parallels get their act together. Using the update feature in Parallels 10, I updated to I ended up with a barely working, messed up Windows XP Pro. Among the problems inflicted by this poorly planned update: 1 Windows freaked out that Parallels Tools had installed a bad disk driver.
Windows warned me of the problem and tried to help me get a better picture. I tried and found the desktop image resolution was still awful. Your new hardware might not work properly. So I wrote Parallels support in detail about the mess they had inflicted. They never wrote back to me. Gee thanks! I wrote to them further about my solution, which was to: 1 Manually download the full installer for This time the resolution problem cleared up and all looks fine.
If you want to download the software on your windows pc or mac, you could either first visit the Mac store or Microsoft AppStore and search for the app OR you can easily use any of the download links we provided above under the "Download and Install" header section to download the application. Our download links are from safe sources and are frequently virus scanned to protect you. Before downloading your app from App Store, I missed the line in the description which said Windows VMs need a paid subscription.
If I didn't, I would never download it. And it had made sense why Lite is free and Standart is not. Standart has great features that I might consider paying for but Lite has no advantage over VirtualBox.
If I remember correctly, you didn't have a Lite version at the beginning. This also adds to the cost of Parallels Lite. As a summary, I may consider paying for Parallels Standart because of great features but will never pay for the Lite when its equivalent software is free. The free version used to support Linux. Parallels has opted to change this to a subscription based feature in an update.
I would be okay with this if the new version was a separate app i. Instead, auto-update kicked in, I find myself in front of a screen demanding a login not previously required when I'm trying to get unversity work done on a time crunch, and I find out that the software wants to charge me going forward after a trial period. Again, my biggest issue with this is the update to an existing app--most other apps that have gone to a subscription model have a separate app store listing for their new version to avoid this problem, or permanently grandfather in old users to certain feature sets.
If parallels communicated this change at some point, they did not do so in the app any time I've been using it the last few months, and I must say I'm very disappointed. Plus i had a key for windows and i never got to enter it Oh and through the adapter that is required to even use an Ethernet to hardline in I probably would have used the windows for other things too eventually I hope you find this helpful.
The problem came in when the application began taking up almost all of my hard drive space. Because of this, he referred me to Apple. After chatting with Apple and troubleshooting, they asked me to try a reboot and that worked. Second, there should be a warning about how much hard drive space you actually need to run it or strongly recommending an external drive because apparently a GB internal hard drive isn't enough.
