Finally installed, now slooooooowww....

After having to start over twice (3.0 to 4.0 upgrade of my XP SP2 VM was broken by the automatic startup of ZoneAlarm - I reinstalled 3.0, turned off ZA in the VM, and then upgraded it again), I finally got Parallels 4.0 installed on my MacBook Pro.

First thing, I started up Delphi 2009, my main development tool and the main reason I run Parallels on my Mac. It took 12 minutes to load - something that normally takes less than a minute (I didn't ever time it before the upgrade). Everything on my VM seems to be running at glacial speed. Unless someone can give me an obvious configuration item to change, I'm going back to 3.0 tonight; I've already wasted most of a day on this, not to mention my $40...

Jim.

 

Try this, it might help.

Make sure any protection system is offline, anti-virus and all likes.
Make sure you have automatic logon
Uninstall your parallel tools
Reboot your VM
Reinstall the tools.
Reboot again the VM

 

Really slow too. I re-installed Parallels Tools and Shutdown Windows, closed Parallels and even re-booted the Mac.
I started up again, started Parallels and the VM - same thing. A couple of programs are taking 10-15mins to launch.

 

Now that is slow!

 

More data

I rebooted my 4.0-converted XP VM and then launched RAD Studio 2009 - took 90 sec. After quitting, a warm restart took 60 sec. After rebooting, the same times for RAD Studio 2007 were 105 sec and 62 sec, respectively.

I then uninstalled Parallels 4.0 and reinstalled Parallels 3.0, and opened the 3.0-compatible backup of the VM I'd converted above, and redid the RAD Studio 2009 tests. The results were now 17 sec and 15 sec, respectively (as opposed to 90 sec and 60 sec).

I'm not reinstalling 4.0 again until such time as I hear it's improved. I was hoping for a 50% speedup, not a 400% slowdown.

 

I should point out that I did, indeed, follow the steps recommended yesterday of uninstalling and reinstalling the Parallels Tools in my 4.0 XP VM, with all of the appropriate reboots, but to no avail.

 

unitoops, did you have shared folders enabled? I have found that shared folders in certain configurations with v4 makes windows performance go down the toilet.

 

I had conversion issues as well and similar to the original post, on my second try, I removed Parallel Tools and a copy of Kaspersky Internet Security that was already installed on my Win XP VM previously and the conversion completed successfully. My converted VM works great, except for noticeable delay in opening Windows file over a network mounted share. The delay is substantial in terms of minutes where previously these same documents would open within seconds. I've verified that no network issue exists and my colleague who is still running PD3 is able to open the files very quickly.

 

I did. But I absolutely need them - my source code lives outside the VM on the Mac itself.

 

Well, if it helps, I crocked up a temporary hack for my self regarding the need to access files on my mac. I enabled file sharing, put a softlink in my public folder to where I needed to be. In windows I mapped a drive letter to my public folder. Shared folders are turned off, I use windows native networking to get to my files as a work around. Works fast enough for my needs.

 

The delay happens before I even touch a shared file, though...it's hard to imagine how.

 

turn off shared folders, see if the problem(delay) goes away

 

Can you please clarify about Shared Folders slowness, that antivirus software is off?

 

John, I have a new install of windows with nothing installed other than what comes with widows off the CD, except I added acdsee32.exe to use as a test program. Here is the thread I started on this yesterday.
http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=31198

 

I'm not inclined to go through another uninstall/install cycle to test whether removing a feature I need will cause it to work. I paid $40 for the upgrade, not for some kind of extended beta. I have spent a LOT of time on this already. I have work to do. 3.0 at this point allows me to do that work very efficiently, so I'm going to let the dust settle, keep a copy of the new 4.0 VM and maybe try again when there's a 4.0 update that works better.

 

>I'm not inclined to go through another uninstall/install cycle to test whether removing a feature I need will cause it to work.

Disabling Shared folders is not a uninstall/install cycle. It is a tick box on the configuration pane. really rather simple to do.

 

Very slow VM boot

I think what unitoops was saying is that he does not want to go throught the task of reinstalling Parallels 4 and importing his VM from Parallels 3 once again which is quite a long task as I have found. He had downgraded to 3 as his earlier post describes.
I have also downgraded (which to me on the usability front is an upgrade) to Parallels 3 since I could not deal with the extremely long boot times of my VM in Parallels 4. I would estimate that it took 4-5 times as long to initially boot compared to 3. Not an upgrade IMO. Only caveat I can add to this discussion is that my VM conversion was a backup/convert. Not sure if the backup/convert (which basically makes a VM twice the size of the original) is part of the slowdown issue but I do not have 4-5 hours to mess with this stuff again. Parallels 3 works just fine for me and is fast to load and boot XP and is quite stable. 3 thumbs down to Parallels 4!!!

 

Yes, that's exactly what I meant. I've done 3 -> 4 and back 3 times now. Enough already.

I even re-did the upgrade of the original VM in case I'd gotten something wrong (in my initial attempt I had ZoneAlarm in auto-start mode and it caused the upgrade to need extra reboots etc; I first went back to 3.0 and turned off ZoneAlarm and then re-upgraded).

The runtimes are alarmingly slower under 4.0 in my case, hence my decision to roll back and stay at 3.0 for a while pending some more updates.

 

I've been into the beta tests heavily, and I've had once the same experience. What I did was deinstalling PD4, rebooting, installing PD3 and start the backuped VM again, deinstalling the PD3 tools, then deinstalled PD3 and installed PD4 again, plus doing the upgrade of the VM. After that it worked fine for me. I know it's time consuming, but I can tell you that PD4 works in general extremly well AND fast, it is to be honest VERY FAST. The idle CPU usage here on my macbook pro was 25% (of max. 200%, dual core) with PD3, and with the very same VM under PD4 it's around 8% for all parallels-related processes. File access, etc. is also heavily improved, plus many bugfixes that helped me dealing with "crazy" applications that I have in my VM.