The two questions I asked them were as follows:

When you add the standard product to your shopping cart it also lists “Extended Download for Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac [300134581] (12 months) “. This costs £3.94

Does this mean you have to pay extra for the ability to redownload the software after your first purchase? If so why does it only last a year? Surely once you have purchased the software and obtained a license key, you should be able to download it as many times as you like. I would assume you could just download the trial and activate it. So what is this charge for?

The second question was why they were charging VAT at 19% when we in the UK pay 17.5%? It’s possible that they are selling it from another EU country that has a higher rate of VAT and we are liable to pay it. If that is true there is no mention on their site of this and as they didn’t reply to my email it looks like I will never know.

I have been happy using the VMware products for years and it looks like I will be continuing to use them. Parallels works fine. I have no complaints about the actual product but I am not going to give money a company that doesn’t reply to a simple pre-sales email. Not exactly good marketing in my opinion.

** Updated **

I have just found this on the FAQ page:

What is Extended Download Service?
Signing up Extended Download Service means that after you purchase our product, we’ll keep a copy of your program for ONE FULL YEAR. If you need to reinstall your Parallels product, you will be able to download it again for free.

What?????  You limit people to one download?  So if their hard drive crashes and they didn’t back up the install file they have to pay for it again? Yeah - not gonna happen.

Before purchasing I emailed a couple of questions to their pre-sales team. If I am right, they have some very strange agreements for people to accept.

If I am wrong then all is fine. If not it’s VMware fusion for me.