Reviews for Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac - Standard Edition

I have yet to experience Parallels crashing, which is so great! It just works! The switching back and forth from parallels to Mac App. is smooth and the cpu consumption on my mac is lower than VM Fusion. Memory consumption was an issue with VM Fusion, long are those days behind me now. Overall, I give VM Fusion 5 on performance and 5 on UI interface and ease of use.

2 of 2 people found this useful

I used vmware for several years and switched to Parallels 8 when it came out. the performance is very snappy and without any compatibility problems for windows 7 and windows software. Smooth integration with desktops and folders/files between mac and windows. Always had some little glitch or another with vmare. Parallels 8 is great.

As a long time Quicken user, I learned that the only way to continue to utilize Quicken with my new MAC was through Parallels. Quicken remains one of the safest and most complete money management tools and Parallels makes this application available to MAC users!

4 of 4 people found this useful

I am a developer and do a tremendous amount of cross-platform work, often across the different versions of the same operating system. With Parallels it is truly a joy to switch and move between operating systems, environments and access my files and tools.

It is highly stable, unintrusive and rather easy to manage. I am not a Systems Engineer, so for me I don't want to learn all the knobs and buttons required to get something like Parallels installed. In fact, I have no desire to know about the internals of a VM or how it works. Parallels fits the bill and lets me do what I do best - write code and have a blast while doing it.

1 of 1 people found this useful

MacBook Pro is a great machine. But too much of the business world still runs Windows. I had heard from several friends that the MacBook is a great machine to run Windows on so I used Bootcamp to give it a try. With native driver support built into Boocamp, Windows was fast and stable. Perhaps even more stable then some systems that are specifically designed to run Windows. The only problem was having to reboot whenever I wanted to switch between Windows and Mac OS.
I had heard about Parallels on a tech podcast so I downloaded the trial version and after a quick install, I was running Windows in a window right beside my Mac OS. While I was expecting it to be slower (being a virtual machine) I was blown away by the speed. The virtual machine was built using the Bootcamp partition so I knew that if I wanted to take the time to reboot, I could still run Windows natively.
Parallels gives you to ability to use your hardware any way you want to. I understand that most Windows hardware is cheeper but if you have a need to use software on both Windows and Mac OS, why buy two seperate machines when one will do the job.

3 of 4 people found this useful

I used Fusion for three years and before that I fudged ways of using Windows. Fusion worked but memory allocation was always a problem and VMware continues to ignore this issue (check their message boards). Available memory would be almost zero and inactive memory would be 3+GB within 30 minutes bogging down the Macs (all of them). I needed Quickbooks so ditching Windows was not an option since Intuit doesn't have a Canadian Quickbooks.

I switched to Parallels and was instantly amazed at how beautifully it integrated with Mac. Seamless is not an understatement. Memory creeps up but Parallels appears to handle it better than Fusion (I haven't used it long enough to be certain). It's a far better product than Fusion.

2 of 3 people found this useful

Yes, I run different versions of Windows on my MAC to support some PC only applications. Parallels has never let me down.

3 of 3 people found this useful

I've been using Parallels for about 6 years now, and it's absolutely worth every penny I've put into it. It's far better than rebooting using BootCamp, as it allows me to maintain access to my OSX apps. As a developer who has to straddle both worlds, I can't imagine working without it.

1 of 2 people found this useful

As a retired trader/investor, it is critically important to me to be able to use DDE linked spreadsheets using Excel, and to be able to actually engage my full desktop from my iPad when I am traveling. Parallels 8 has provided me with the most excellent vehicle for both. Works extremely well.

5 of 11 people found this useful