Status Quo II; the wrath of Parallels Desktop

I used to be an Apple evangelist. I still like Apple and some of their products, but we’re not friends like we used to be. Earlier in December, wrestling with a technical issue on my computer got me thinking about life and all sorts of stupid stuff (6 hours doing the same thing over and over to fix a stupid computer problem on your day off so you can work the next day will do that), including wondering why I was working on fixing the problem and not actually leapfrogging the issue and actually improving things.

I didn’t learn my lesson, apparently, so life gave me a second chance today. I’ve been at my computer off and on for about 9 hours today - so far - fighting the same issue I’d solved a couple weeks back. The same fix didn’t address the same problem, so I’m left to wade through support forums and attempt veeerrrryyyyy slllllooooowwwww processes like uninstalling and reinstalling and uninstalling and reinstalling.

To be fair, this isn’t a Mac issue at all, it’s an issue with a specific piece of software. But helping an ailing piece of software gives you a look under the hood of an OS, and man, the stuff involved with maintaining MacOS these days is largely beyond me. I’m not a UNIX guru; I can get around a line prompt with some basic stuff, but man, this stuff’s a little ugly. And, it seems, necessary to know about.

Anyway, I’ve decided to try to test the idea of “improving” vs. “just fixing.” I hope it’s not a Tool Time exercise in futile optimism. I’m trying to jump through the painful hoops of moving away from Parallels Desktop, a heartbreaking piece of software that’s cost me a Sunday a couple weeks ago and now a December 25th of family time, and also painful because it’s so, so close to being what I need without quite getting there. (The catastrophic crashes that happen with alarming regularity are really the dealbreaker. I could live with any of the other hiccups I’ve encountered.)

This process is a pain in the ass, lots of chicken-and-egg issues. I have a laptop sort of working so I can work tomorrow, it’s not ideal but I can get by. I’m about 10 minutes (2 or 3 restarts) away from bashing my head against the next shot-in-the-dark stab at a solution. If I can just get a foothold and back up my stuff, I’m going to move away from Parallels to VMWare Fusion, a reportedly less sexy and more reliable piece of software that does exactly what Parallels does, hopefully without some of the life-sucking catastrophic failures.

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