Maximizing RAM Size

I enjoy the Parallels experience except that applications tend to load and run too slow. Also, large data sets are slow to process. Looks like all of the 1GB of system memory is not being utilized when in the Windows VM. How can I let Windows applications use more than the 604Mb suggested?

If I upgrade my Mac to 2GB does the limit also go up, or is it set at 604MB? I'm using build 5584 and running XP Home edition.

Thanks,

Larry

Mac Mini OS X 10.4.11
1.83 GHz
1 GB 667 MHz DDR2

 

The amount of RAM that Parallels allocates to the VM is user selectable, however it is only freed when the VM exits. This means that if you have a Mac with 1GB of memory and set 800mb for Parallels then Mac OS only has 200MB left for everything else that is running on your system (including the OS itself, which requires at least 256MB).

The "reccomended maximum" is there because if you allocate too much RAM to the VM, your Mac will start "thrashing" memory to the disk and become unresponsive. You can change the amount of RAM given to any VM in its configuration settings if you wish. You can also manually change the "reccomended maximum" in Parallels prefrences, however this will not give your machine the ability to run without enough memory.

If you upgrade the amount of RAM in your Mac, then there would be more total meory available to assign to Parallels which speeds things up.

I find that Parallels actually requires a system with at least 2gb of RAM in it in order to be useful.