Hey gang- When quitting Parallels Desktop, is it okay to choose the option Power Off while Windows is running? It appears to me that that option might be analogous to "pulling the plug" on a hardware PC. But it is so fast and convenient that I'd like to be able to use it if it's okay. Thanks! Kupe
Yes, that option is exactly like pulling the power cord out of a running windows system, with all the possibilities of corrupted files and other evilness that goes along with it. I would highly recommend hitting suspend instead.
I second that answer What I have done is set my Parallels preferences to automatically suspend a VM on quitting. It takes awhile to shut down as a result, but it's worth it to avoid the potential corruption of my VM.
In general you should shutdown properly or Suspend the OS. I've noticed though that what kind of file system you use might affect the system. Initially I had a FAT32 system and it would randomly run ScanDisk even though I had shutdown properly. I switched to NTFS and the problems went away. On occassion, I "Powered Off" the OS and it still wouldn't ScanDisk. I read somewhere that NTFS is set up in such a way that kind of helps against drive corruption. To what extent this is true though, I don't know.
