Parallels Issue

Hello All, I am a new mac user, picked up my MBP about a month ago.

Anyways, I also purchased Parallels Desktop 3.0 and about 50-60% of the time when it is being ran, I get really bad slow down and have to do a manual shutdown and restart of the system. When it does work, I get an error first saying it shut-down and had to be restarted. But at least it runs after that.


Is parallels bad?

Something I'm doing wrong?


Thanks much in advance.

~Zach

We'll probably be able to resolve this pretty easily.

Firstly, I need some information.

How much RAM does your MBP have? How much RAM are you allocating to your Virtual Machine? What guest OS are you running (Vista, XP, Ubuntu etc?) and is it the virtual machine that's really slow, OS X or both?

MBP has 4gig ram.

The VM says its using 512 mb ram, I don't know how to change that.

Running windows Xp.

and it slows down everything, OS X & XP.

Thanks for the quick reply Zoo

I allocate at least 1Gb of RAM to XP and Vista.

You need to have the VM "stopped" and then just click on the memory setting and a slide bar will appear to increase/decrease the RAM setting.

OK. For XP 512MB is usually enough, unless you're doing something memory intenstive. As you have a healthy 4GBs of RAM, you can probably safely allocate a full GB to the VM.

Make sure you have at least SP2 installed, or even better SP3, under XP The reason is that the original release of XP does not work so well with Parallels 3.0 (although it's fine with an older version). The reason I even mention this is that you need to check some settings, but these won't work on XP SP1.

So assuming the above is true... Open your virtual machine, but don't actually start it. Go to Edit then Edit Virtual Machine.

On the Resource, make sure Options is highlighted, then on the right hand side click the 'Advanced' tab. Make sure the acceleration level is set to 'high' and the Enable Intel VT-x support is ticked.

Also tick 'Optimize for better performance of Mac OS X applications'. If you prefer to have the XP machine have the better resources, note than anything going on within OS X will significantly reduce the overall performance, so it's best to allow OS X to manage virtual memory and resources (in my opinion).

On the right, click memory. Allocated anything up to a gig (anything more in XP is probably more than necessary). In video memory, unless you're doing photoshop stuff or playing games, 16MB is enough.

Click OK at the bottom right, then go to Parallels/Preferences then click memory, and ensure the memory limit is adjusted automatically.

Now boot up XP - go to Start, programs, parallels tools, and run parallels tools. Follow the onscreen instructions and reboot.

This should solve your issue. If it doesn't then I can only assume you've either used too much HDD space for your virtual machine, or have a bad install - perhaps delete everything and start again.