Parallels Desktop 4.0 came out today, and although 3.0 was working fine for me, I decided to upgrade right away after reading some initial reactions. At $40, it didn't strike me as a horrible expense.
The first thing that sold me was that it finally supported multiple CPU's. My Mac Pro has four, so naturally I thought it'd be nice to give my Windows XP VM a little more processing power. There's actually a setting now to let the app manage resources for you, but I'm not sure I entirely trust that. Regardless, the usual combination of Visual Studio, SQL Server and such is visibly a little more snappy. I notice ReSharper Intellisense acting faster in particular.
With the initial reports of some speed differences, I admit that I had a silly desire and hope... that RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, in all of its 2002, sprite based assembler glory, would run more smoothly. Before, it was very choppy, almost to the point of not being fun. But what do you know, it runs better than it ever did on my PC's of that era. I'm pleased.
Apparently the upgrade can potentially hose shared Boot Camp/Parallels partitions, but I don't have that setup. So I'm pleased with the little tweaks. The UI is prettier too. The whole product feels more polished.
I wish I had an Intel Mac, I miss RCT2 but it's not worth the effort to dig out my old ThinkPad to play it on. Virtual PC on this G4 just wouldn't be worth it either.
I've wasted most of my day today fighting this buggy upgrade. XP runs much slower, copy and paste functionality is gone, just headaches all around. I have a pretty simple setup - no Boot Camp or anything special.
Ugh. Now I have to spend the evening going back to 3.0. A few minutes on the Parallels community forum shows I have plenty of company. Oh well, at least they still have my $40.00. :)
I did back it up. Took an hour and a huge chunk of hard drive, but I did. :)
I'm going to stick with 4.0 ... for now. I reinstalled Tools and it helped a little. I may have gotten to the point where it's not as good as before, but not so bad that I want to waste time downgrading.