Until a few weeks ago, I used Parallels version 5 under Lion, which worked fine (after tweaking it with a little script/launcher). But for the new mac (where Lion was pre-installed) I had to buy the upgrade to version 7. I was thinking about moving to Fusion or VirtualBox, because I don't like Parallels' upgrade policy, however I was just too lazy to make a new installation of Windows XP – with Parallels I could use the same virtual machine file I had before, with all my Windows-stuff installed.

I was very happy to see that the upgrade process was successful without any problems, so I could use my older Parallels-Windows installation. It works OK, but now there are sometimes error messages at Windows start up. Seems to be confused with searching for USB devices. Parallels has some other bugs, like sometimes not displaying an (Windows-)app icon in the dock, and from time to time not starting an app at all.

But the most disturbing thing with Parallels Desktop is the ads. Yes the ads. You buy an app and you get ads. After every update, you get ads for some Windows anti-virus apps. You get invitations to buy something in the Parallels "Convenience store". And sometimes, when you just want to start up Parallels you get a screen sized banner "BUY KASPERSKY ANTI VIRUS FOR MAC AND WINDOWS!!!" – you can check "never ever show me that s... again", however you will still see it, time after time.

Obviously, Parallels wants to squeeze out as much money as they can: In the "Coherence"-mode, you have a nice little menubar icon, where you can get to the Windows start menu. That's neat, but somehow they forgot to put there the item to go to the virtual machine preferences/set-up. So every time you want to have a look at your keyboard-shortcuts or anything else, you need to select "Exit Coherence" and only then you can go to the preferences. Hmm... what they didn't forget in that tiny menu: "Convenience Store" where you can buy attractive upgrades for your virtual machine...

So in the end, Parallels truly emulates the Windows experience very well, unfortunately also the parts of it which you really hate...

I have run parallels since version 1 and I now own 3 copies of version 7 personally.
I have installed versions 3-7 on over 30 Macs at work, however with ONE machine is constantly crashes(6-8 times a day running only Outllook, the Mac version is a piece of utter CRAP in comparison). I have had zero response from parallels. Bought a bundle with VMware in the bundle and installed that and all is stable.
I had tried reinstall of Parallels
I had installed all updates
Version 6 was stable but the person was upgraded to a new machine running OSX 10.7 so the move to Parallels 7 was inevitable.

Tried almost every available VM app but PD was the easiest to install. Every noob can start with PD even me. :)

cool!

I've been a Mac user just over a year, and Parallels made it possible. While I've gradually weaned my way off of Windows into more and more OSX apps, I still use Parallels regularly for Quicken and the more advance mindmapping features in MindManager for Windows.

I did run into one serious glitch with snapshots. Snapshots were taking up more and more space on my drive, to the point that I was almost completely out of free space. I couldn't delete the snaphots, and Parallels support was less than helpful. I was able to resolve it with a lot of forum searching and have had no issues since.

Overall, Parallels does what it says and does it well. I'm able to use my Mac apps, which I love, and those key Windows apps that don't have adequate Mac replacements or are required by my company. It's like having two computers in one.

PS -- Bought my Air from MacMall, and loved that they did all the Parallels setup for me before shipping me my machine.

I just downloaded as part of the bundle and the supplied activation code does not work. Any ideas?

Really Fast, but some problems writes to disk, and lost my bootcamp disk a every mac restart. (MacPro 2Disk RAID0 Mac + 1 Disk BootCamp) same issur than version 5…

After updating Parallels I could not save my Visual Basic 6 projects in a shared folder (Documents folder) from within Visual Basic 6 interface. I tried several things including reboot Windows 7 and mac, reinstall tools etc.

To have Visual Basic 6 working as before I had to install an older build of Parallels 5 that I fortunately had.

Has anyone else been able to compress or resize a vm install? When I do so Parallels complains that I have snapshots installed even when I don't. Of course tech support refuses to answer my question about this.

P.S. I would NOT recommend this product (even with the bundle version) to people that frequently use tech support.

With WIndows Application sharing disabled, the program seems to remove any documents/aliases/folders from the right side of your Dock, claiming it's removing the Windows Application folder on launch (sometimes second launch). Has anyone found a fix for this?