While there was a major change over the weekend, I kept thinking to myself that there is no way this is related to the time change. Computers are beyond the point where a simple time change can cause havoc like this, right?

FALSE

It appears that Dreamweaver doesn’t like the Daylight Savings Time change very much. According to an article on Adobe’s site, which strangely enough was just updated today, when you select certain lines of code while in code view in PHP or ASP sites, you may experience crashes. Keep reading for steps on how to solve this issue.

1. If Dreamweaver is open, quit the application.
2. Delete the WinFileCache-AD76BB20.dat file from the Dreamweaver user configuration folder. Note that on Windows, the Application Data and AppData folders are hidden by default, so verify that your Windows Explorer folder options are set to View Hidden Folders. The location of this file is as follows:
   • Dreamweaver CS3 on Windows Vista:
     C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Dreamweaver 9\Configuration
   • Dreamweaver CS3 on Windows XP:
     C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Adobe\Dreamweaver 9\Configuration
3. Restart Dreamweaver.

Again, this problem is only on Windows XP and Vista Machines and does not effect OS X users.

Here is the link to the article on Adobe’s website.

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb402776&sliceId=2

Round 2 of our VMWare Fusion vs Parallels Speed test kind of surprised me. In Round 1, we pitted VMWare Fusion vs Parallels with Windows XP SP2 for our speed test. Parallels was the victor in every category in Round 1 which wasn’t much of a surprise since it is the more mature product and VMWare Fusion is the newcomer.
In Round 2 of our speed test, we decided to use Windows Vista with VMWare Fusion and Parallels for our speed test. All test were run 3 times and an average of the 3 speeds were used for the results. I must admit there were some really strange results in this test and the ultimate winner was kind of a surprise also.

For this test we decided to give the virtual machine a little more memory. We bumped the memory to 1500mb of memory for the power hungry Microsoft Vista. The machine that this test was run on was a MacPro with dual 2.66 processors, 5GB of memory and 4 500GB HDD configured striped. We ran the same test as we did in round 1:

Time to install from first boot to the desktop showed up for the first time.
Time to reboot with a clean OS install
Time to suspend the machine with a clean OS install
Time to boot with a clean OS install
Time to wakeup from a suspended system with a clean OS install

So, here are the results:

Time to install from first boot to the desktop showed up for the first time

WINNER = VMWare Fusion – 10 Minutes 44.5 seconds
Parallels – 12 Minutes 39.7 seconds

Time to reboot with a clean OS Install

WINNER = VMWare Fusion – 39.6 seconds
Parallels – 53.6 seconds

Time to suspend machine with a clean OS Install

WINNER = VMWare Fusion – 4.5 seconds
Parallels – 5.5 seconds

Time to boot machine with a clean OS Install

VMWare Fusion – 48.8 seconds
WINNER = Parallels – 35.6 seconds

Time to wakeup from suspended system with a clean OS Install

WINNER = VMWare Fusion – 4.3 seconds
Parallels – 5.1 seconds

So, round 2 goes to the newcomer. With the exception of time to bootup the powered down virtual machine, VMWare Fusion takes every category with Windows Vista.

Some interesting things to note on these test were that both Parallels and VMWare Fusion had problems waking up the suspended Vista Virtual machine the first time. The Parallels Vista Virtual machine seemed locked up and after 2 minutes and 30 seconds, I had to force quite the application. The VMWare Fusion Vista Virtual machine took 48.7 seconds to wakeup the first time. I ran 3 test on each after the first attempt to wake the machines for this test since both had problems on the first wakeup after being suspended with Vista. Another thing that really surprised me was the difference in time that it took Parallels to install its tools in Vista versus VMWare Fusion. Fusion handled the Vista Tools install very quickly while Parallels took much longer for its tools install.

The only other thing I found very strange was that on VMWare Fusion, you could reboot the machine faster than you could startup a shutdown virtual machine. This is the only category that Parallels outpaced Fusion in during the Microsoft Vista test. All test were run 3 times though and the same strange results happened each time.

Vista VMWare Fusion vs Vista Parallels Speed Test – And the Winner is VMWare Fusion!!!

While I have recently done away with my last PC at home I still use Parallels to run Windows so I can use my Microsoft Money. Financial software is one of those things that is hard to break away from and I have yet to find one that lets me see my cash flow like Microsoft Money does. Admittedly, I haven’t tried any version of Quicken in quite sometime, and have only tried a handful of Mac financial products such as Cha-Ching. None have wowed me enough to break my Microsoft Money addiction.

You can take Microsoft Money Plus for a 60 day test drive by CLICKING HERE and downloading a trial.