imac & Parallels - Win XP vs Win Vista

Discussion in 'Windows Virtual Machine' started by davedough, Dec 31, 2007.

  1. davedough

    davedough Junior Member

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    Many thanks. I think I'm about to make some good headway in setting up my new iMac and understanding things. You have been very helpful.

    Dave
     
  2. Eru Ithildur

    Eru Ithildur Forum Maven

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    Great, glad I could be of assistance. Just raise a flag if you run into any other problems.
     
  3. davedough

    davedough Junior Member

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    Eru

    Not yet a problem - just trying to avoid one or two, maybe!

    Just downloaded Paragon NTFS. Price is $29 download Plus $12 for actual disk

    2 more questions:
    Monitor Calibration - When I calibrate the iMac monitor (in iMac mode) does the calibration remain valid when running Parallels, or is 2nd monitor calibration needed? Which system is controlling the monitor?

    Printer/Paper/Ink profiles - I have made many paper profiles on my XP for my Epson 3800 printer. Are these profiles valid when printing under Parallels? Printing under Leopard?

    Dave
     
  4. Eru Ithildur

    Eru Ithildur Forum Maven

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    1,954
    Dave,

    You hit me in a spot I don't deal with much, sorry. I would calibrate the iMac monitor to Leopard, as that is what I believe it syncs to.

    Your printer profiles should be set on whatever side you are printing from. So as it sounds like you are printing from your Windows side, I would calibrate the printer from there.
     
  5. Macaby

    Macaby Member

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    Uninstalling Windows Vista...

    I'm presently running mac 10.5.1 with Parallels and Vista Home Premium. While it works, I'm not happy with the setup. Opening Parallels with my Vista Premium seems to be more or less OK EXCEPT for one thing. I can't close Windows in the normal manner with the "shut-down" button after the Start button. If I try to shut it down in this manner, the computer goes into a endless loop. The ONLY way I've found to shut Windows down is with the red button up in the in the upper left hand corner.

    I'm thinking about loading XP Home in place of my Vista. My question is how would I go about this. If I did go this route. If I were to dump Parallels in the trash, would that also take out my Vista installation? If I did this, I would certainly install Parallels and then, XP Home. All I want is a stable Windows installation on my MacBook.

    One other question is "How do I start a new thread on this website?"
     
  6. davedough

    davedough Junior Member

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    What did I do Wrong? How do I restore normal operatrion?
    When I now run Paralels the normal windows screen exits to the right leaving only the Winsows blue bar on the bottom (just above the iMac symbles) and I have the imac screen above the blue windows bar. When I open any windows program it opens within the open imac space above the blue windows bar.
     
  7. ReneS

    ReneS Member

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    Coherence maybe..

    Hi,

    Maybe you turned coherence on. Try to switch it off.

    Rene
     
  8. ptmccain

    ptmccain Bit poster

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    Do NOT install Vista. Unless you have TONS of memory to allocate to it and a Mac Pro with maxed out processors and absolutely must have VISTA, do not do it.

    I'm so sorry I tried. My iMac has 3 gigs of RAM and it is disaster.

    I am going to wipe my hard drive clean of Parallels and do a completely clean reinstall of Parallels and Windows XP.

    The difference in speed between my MacBook Pro running Windows XP in parallels and my desktop iMac running Vista in parallels is day/night.

    Windows XP is lightning fast on my laptop. Vista is taking at least seven minute es even to start up and is bogging down my Mac horribly.
     
  9. Macaby

    Macaby Member

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    Earlier in this thread I stated that I was having trouble shutting down Windows with the normal procedure and that the ONLY way I could shut it down was with the "red" shutdown button in the upper left hand corner.

    I then added some memory to boost my MacBook from 1 GB to 4 GB's. I also "upped" my Parallels memory to 1 GB from the default 512 MB setup.

    The difference is night and day. While I may not have the fastest Windows Vista laptop in my neighborhood, from the time I hit enter from the Parallels window until Vista pops up on the screen is 50 seconds. My main reason for Vista is Excel and the spreadsheets seem to load fast or certainly fast enough for me.

    FYI, my Vista is the Home Premium version that I've been led to believe does not work with Parallels although it works fine. It is a complete OEM version.

    I would have gone the XP route, but my Vista edition was less expensive.

    The short version of this is that I'm very happy with my Parallels 3.0 version coupled with Windows Vista Home Premium.
     
  10. ReneS

    ReneS Member

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    New thread

    Macaby, to start a new thread, click on the big red + just above the listings of existing threads.

    Rene
     
  11. ayeying

    ayeying Member

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    Actually, if you've used vista for a long time in a virtual machine, more then 5 minutes, you'll notice that Vista actually speeds up over time. No joke, I don't believe the stories I read online myself. Currently, I have a MacBook I run parallels on, I dedicated 512MB Ram (I have 4GB on the machine, but only 3GB usable due to chipset limitations) and 32MB Video ram to vista, no more, no less. It is a complete virtual machine, 28.9GB virtual disk size. It runs as fast as XP, even the boot time is similar.

    Furthermore, if you turn down the settings in Vista, not running everything in sidebar, vista's non-aero theme, you'll notice that its not as bad as XP after you get it running nice enough. Settings matters in terms of performance. Perhaps you have everything on while I'm running a minimalistic Vista.
     
  12. Macaby

    Macaby Member

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    I agree with you that Visa runs very well within Parallels VM. I'm running my copy with 1024MB since I have the latest MacBook which supports 4GB (which I have.)

    When you state that you have yours set at 512MB, does that mean 512MB of your memory does not exist or is not usable when you are in Mac mode?

    Also, how did you come up with 32MB for video ram? That happens to be what I'm also using, but I picked that number "out of the air." Parallels recommended 16MB of the 64MB available, but I figured, "What the hell, I might as well try 32MB" since 64MB were available.
     
  13. ayeying

    ayeying Member

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    My Vista VM is set to 512MB ram. For the video ram, i just chose 32MB. There's no real reason for it.
     

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