Parallels Workstation

Bob X

Does anyone use Parallels Workstion[^] and what do you think of it? Are there any good alternatives out on the market? I am looking for a program where I can switch between booted operating systems and not have to go through a boot cycle.

Anton Afanasyev

If you're on Windows, VPC is free and good enough in most aspects. However, VMWare does more, is better, and, well, is better. But not free (though the cost isnt that big).

:badger:

El Corazon

Bob X wrote:

Are there any good alternatives out on the market?

I have parallels and am "reasonably" happy with it. It allows a few things VMware doesn't and VMware offers a lot more that Parallels doesn't have. Which is better? well, I would say VMware has a more stable solution, Parallels has a few bugs, though admittedly I am using it in an odd manor. I am network sharing the host drive as a second disk rather than using a virtual disk, this allows multiple parallels VM instances to share the same disk ( :omg: ). There is a specific reason why I have Parallels, but it is tricky for any machine. :) All in all VMware is better for 98% of most people's needs. Other solutions are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_virtual_machines[^]

_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)

Ed Poore

I've been using VMWare and found it to be fantastic, tried VPC but VMWare far superior, especially in it's support of OSs.

Bob X wrote:

I am looking for a program where I can switch between booted operating systems and not have to go through a boot cycle.

I would think that VMWare is capable of this since it has it's own BIOS and everything, it's just like having a miniature computer running inside your existing one.

Ray Cassick

I just wish you could access interface cards on the PCI bus with it. I would love to use it in my test lab...

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Kevin McFarlane

A friend of mine has used VPC, VMWare and Parallels and has found Parallels the most performant.

Kevin

Ed Poore

I just wish it would transfer wireless cards through to it, rather than making them look like bog-standard ethernet connections. But yeah there are some gripes with it, perhaps some have been sorted in v6 of it which I haven't tried yet.