“With today’s launch of Microsoft’s Windows 8, Parallel’s is warning Mac users that the app is not ready to update to the new OS,” Jordan Kahn reports for 9to5Mac.
“In a support document on the company’s website, it issued a ‘critical and urgent Windows 8 service advisory’ telling customers it should wait before upgrading from an existing installation of Windows to Windows 8,” Kahn reports. “According to the advisory, upgrading your virtual machine from an already installed version of Windows to Windows 8 could ‘damage your virtual machine, causing you to lose all your data, files and Windows applications.'”
Kahn reports, “The warning applies to Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac, as well as versions 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, and 2.x. You can do a full install of Windows 8 to a new virtual machine without any issues in Parallels 8. ”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
Good times. How am I supposed to upgrade my iPad to a Surface? This is bulls$^#!
Grow up!
I think he meant it as humor. 🙂
Don’t you mean downgrade
And Coherence broke under Parallels 7 and Mountain Lion. Guess they’re too busy getting Parallels 8 to work with Windows 8 to fix that. Oh well…
Not in my wildest dreams I would install Windows 8 as a virtual machine. I keep Windows XP for just one app I need in Parallels Desktop, that’s it.
1. Worse is that one app has a Mac version that is six years behind the Windows version.
Why anyone would run a memory hog version of Windows instead of a lean one is beyond me.
I can answer that. My app Mac version is so old that it will not run under Lion so I am forced to use win 7 and fusion.
Windoze 8 ball : FAIL
I don’t know what parallel techs are smoking.
In Parallels, I upgraded from Win7 beta to Win7 RTM SP1, then to Win 8 Beta, to Win 8 RTM without issue. Wait, it did blow up, but did it again from Win7 beta strait to Win8 Pro RTM without issue.
On VMware I went from WnXP, to Vista, to 7 to 8 Pro. Works great.
So again what’s smoke’n?
It says ‘COULD’, not ‘WILL’ lose data. The Parallels technote is assuming they are speaking to the lowest common denominator user, one who may or may not be familiar with the myriad problems or glitches in upgrading Windows.
Parallels may have identified with reasonable certainty various problems with installing Win8, that they felt the need to warn their customer base about it.
For a major release such as Windows 8, it does make sense to do a fresh install for a VM instead of an upgrade, but people have different priorities or uses for their environments.
It’s sad that the business world is so windows entrenched and does not invest in Apple OS over Windows. We use Windows at work and spend over 50% of our computer time working out bugs and security issues. It’s a terrible system and over complicated and unintuitive. My home laptop emulator app failed years ago and I have no intentions to revive the resting beast! It is so laughable that mysterious terminate batch file and end task messages still seem like good programming to these utter morons and imbeciles.
Don’t upgrade your bootcamp partition either, it may hose your Mac partition.
If it should ever come to pass that I need Windows contaminating my Mac, I’m gonna upgrade to a six-pack of beer and go out on the patio and smoke cigars until the need passes.