MacBook Air, Parallels

OK, OK, I know there are many other people out there who have had great success with Parallels and the MacBook Air...I, however, was not one of them. I installed the trail download and received a 14-day activation key. I already installed BootCamp as shared in a previous storyline, so I was hoping that I would not have to reinstall for Parallels. I held out for this one simple thing for two reasons...one, the drive is only 74 GB formated (80 GB advertised), and 12 GB were spent on the BootCamp partition; two, the time it would take to install the slipstreamed version of XP SP2 and update it in Parallels. I ended up spending more time trying to get the BootCamp partition to work well than I would have trying to install another version. Here were some things that just went too far south...

* The mouse did not work within Parallels the first or second time I launched Parallels.

* The first time I ran Parallels, it actually gave me the mac "blue screen of death"...you know the one that says press and hold down the power button to restart. Not good...not good at all...

* Parallels ended up corrupting my BootCamp partition even after I uninstalled the program from the partition. In fact, when I booted into XP after removing everything, chkdsk ran and found three pages of files that were corrupt and attempted to repair them.

* When I deleted the files on the partition in an attempt to reinstall them from a back-up, there were many locked files. This was probably not a direct Parallels issue. However, the files that remain in my Trash were files that chkdsk left behind from the Parallels install and uninstall. I was able to get the files out of the trash, but they remain on the drive until I can get XP to remove them somehow.

Since I have read so much around the internet about how great the product is, I hesitate to say that Parallels is an terrible product. I would, however, say that it is not for me and I will not be purchasing it. There were things that I may have done incorrectly with the XP install...however, since it is working incredibly well in BootCamp, I am going to go with not so much...If you have this product and it works well, I am happy for you. If you don't have the time to create things properly and use Parallels as a true virtual machine, I would urge you to pause and reconsider. Good luck...enjoy...