It’s been nearly two weeks since my MacBook Air arrived and I have used it almost exclusively. I bought and setup Parallels 6. I created several Windows 7 Ultimate templates with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Office 2010 Business, and used all my remaining licenses in the process. The VM template was given 60GB of hard disk, 2GB ram, and two cores.
I took it to work and setup a cloned VM as my client development machine. Everything worked better than expected. The MacBook Air built the massive client solution in two minutes and 38 seconds. The previous HP i3 machine with 4GB ram built the solution in just over four minutes. A true testament to the power of the solid state disk if I ever do say so.
Then problems started. First the machine started to freeze. From freezing it went to displaying the power sign of death. Within the first week it crashed five times. It varied from power screens of death, freezing, and even one blue screen within my Windows VM with a “Memory Management” problem. Started to suspect bad RAM at this point, but being new to both the OSX and Parallels I couldn’t tell whether it was hardware or fake hardware causing the problem.
This past Sunday an upgrade was released to Parallels 6, and I’d hoped if it was Parallels maybe it’d be resolved by the update. Unfortunately the upgrade didn’t help resolve the crashing. The crashes were random without being reproducible unless you count when I was in the programming groove it seemed to pick those moments to die. Luckily the MacBook Air boots in no time flat, and I can get my VM to boot relatively fast for a Windows machine.
I ended up contacting Apple support’s fast lane to schedule a service call. Last night I spoke to Cody, the Apple support rep, and booted the Mac to the hardware test utility running off the reinstall thumb drive. The quick hardware test proved to have no known problems. The extended hardware test was run three times in a row. Unfortunately it showed no signs of problems either.
At this point it seems there is no hardware problem, which leads me to believe Parallels 6 is the protagonist in this hardware play. Several other developers at the client site are using MacBook Pro’s with Parallels 6 without any incident. As far as I can tell it seems Parallels 6 does not play well with the MacBook Air. I’ve been researching any known problems (Apple rumors I should say,) and came across several kernel panic threads. The threads were related to first generation Nvidia 320M drivers on the Air. Considering that the Air doesn’t have discrete graphics memory it’s possible the combination of no discrete graphics memory, first gen drivers, and the strain of running Parallels causes a triangle of disaster.
For now I just have to live with the looming crashes, interrupted workflows, and the lost trust in my $1,800 development machine.