My Parallel Universe and the Event Horizon

Up till June 2012, my greatest wish to have the best and most powerful laptop was simply that - a wish. Then Apple unveiled the new Mac Book Pro with the 15" Retina Display, complete with SSD and I-Core 7 processor. It cost just under S$3000 which was a lot more than some of the other top level laptop PCs in the market. But there is something lovely and sexy at once with a Mac. I had given a much loved Mac Book Air which I acquired as a back-up to an Acer T-4810 laptop I used for work presentations back then, and more importantly, to expose myself to the OSX platform. I found the Mac easy to use, except that you can forget about trying to remember all the keystroke shortcuts which Mac veterans will always have an unfair advantage over. In fact, the moment, I approached using the Mac OSX freed from the keyboard shortcuts, all the psychological barriers quickly left. Surely, I did not work on the Mac as quickly as the vets might, but at least I was now able to embrace this whole new eco-system.

Ambitious to consolidate all my laptop needs into this brand new Mac Book Pro, I acquired Parallels 7 and could not wait to install it on the Mac and migrate all my Windows and Office files over. Then Parallels offered the upgrade to Parallels 8 to match the Windows 8 upgrade. I made the bold upgrade to both platforms. For a very brief moment, it seemed like the glorious confluence of all my expectations were met.

Then very quickly, through a series of mishaps and other oddities in performance, I realise what a horrid mistake it was to be an early adopter in this game.

1. Parallels was rather slow, sluggish and lags in performance.
2. Not all the Windows functions and settings worked correctly. The worst mistake was having everything I had configured erased because I tried the Windows "refresh" but on the Parallels Virtual Machine, it executed a PC-Reset. No joke. Spoke to Parallels about it and the engineer (probably from a call centre in Bangalore) sounded indifferent and resigned about the problem I described, "You see," he said, "some of the functions in Parallels will not work like it would on a normal PC." I wished the advertisement on the box and website said so.
3. These things which did not work included: windows and fields which do not function, sluggish and retarded keyboard and mouse cursor sensitivity, program windows which do not respond to clicks, poor integration of plug-ins and such, including download buttons which disappear on webpages.
4. Programs suddenly fail, probably due to faulty PC registry, and installing a registry fixer resulted in another set of other programs (iTunes, in this case), going bonkers with a pop-up warning for it to be re-installed, and when I tried, it all failed to install from the downloaded file due to another error. I have to hack Time Machine and the Intego Bootable Back-up file to extract the program and run from there... which resulted in
5. The default applications folder for Windows going awry and I had to use the Windows.pvm file (Parallels Virtual Machine) to boot up my Windows environment and work from there.
6. Now, I can't tell if I am working Windows 8 and my Office Suite etc from the back-up file in Doc/Parallels or if that back-up file is not working as the default location for all my Windows 8 programs.
Other problems all sorted popping up and now I totally regret:
(a) not upgrading my RAM and internal memory to 16GM RAM and getting a 500GB internal SSD;
(b) keeping the I-Core 5 desktop I had with Windows 7 in it, and working from there, instead of running everything on the Mac. I have given the desktop CPU away since, not wanting to hoard any superfluous hardware which someone might have a more pressing need for.
So now, on another sleepless night, I am forced to make a terrible decision to kill my Parrallels VM, and try to use Boot Camp Assistant to make it all work better for me and my Mac Book Pro.

Say a prayer, that I do know what I am doing next!