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Comment by tanousjm | Hacker News Reader

In a variety of benchmarks, Parallels 8 beat Fusion 5 by five to twenty percent. But both were remarkably capable of running Windows 7 and Windows 8.

Heck, even Crysis was "playable" on Medium settings.

Any other tests you want to see? Let me know!

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I don't think even twice as fast performance will convince me to buy another Parallels upgrade when they treat their customers like this:

http://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/x0qgs/using_parallels_h...

Every time I started Parallels I got a huge window asking me to register in order to get software updates. And when I did I got ads instead. :-(

Agreed -- with the constant promotional popups on launch, running Parallels starts feeling like you're using an ad-supported product. Except you still have to pay for it!

And no, there's no way to completely turn them off. Each individual promo popup has a checkbox that'll make it stop showing up, but that's useless, because they run so many promos. Even the super-secret "defaults write" command that Parallels support hands out only works until you next update Parallels.

Try this, it helped me:

defaults write com.parallels.Parallels\ Desktop ProductPromo.ForcePromoOff -bool YES

I really don't want to upgrade because of this BS. I don't know if switching to VMWare is worth it.

Funny. I just had a call from a very nice VMWare customer service agent after a few days of exchanging emails: Office 2013 on Win 8 has graphical glitches in Fusion 5 if 3D acceleration is enabled.

While he did not have a fix for me, he did tell me about a workaround (disabling 3D accelleration) and reassured me that the problem is known and actively being worked on.

Considering that both Win 8 and Office 2013 are prerelease software, I am entirely fine with that.

And to get back to the point: that phone call was extremely pleasant and really gave me that warm, fuzzy feeling that they actually care about my problems. That, honestly, is worth a lot to me. Indeed more than a few percentage points of performance.

Parallels has terrible customer service. And frankly until i can play Skyrim in it any VM decently, I'll be using bootcamp.

BUT I do use Fusion to access my bootcamp drive. And it works like a charm. I don't game that way, but I do develop that way. Sometimes.

A baseline comparison of the same tests running in Boot Camp might give a nice understanding of what kind of general performance loss you're going to get by virtualising at all.

I am actually more curious about the percent increase in performance from parallels 7 to parallels 8. Do you have any statistics on that?

How much faster is P8 than P7? A ballpark approximation would be helpful. Thanks for the report.

Is it worth the upgrade form P7 to P8?

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