Virtual Machine Sleep when not Focused

Hello,

I bought Parallels last week, and have it installed on my Core Duo Mac Mini.

Now I have 2GB RAM, I am happy to leave Parallels running Windows XP full time. I did notice however that Parallels uses roughly 8% of my CPU time (looking in top). Whilst on the one hand I think that is very good, I also wonder if another option could be engineered...

Could we have a new option to "sleep the VM when Parallels window doesn't have the focus".

So, there would be just enough CPU power used to keep open any network connections, allow the system clock to update the time, but otherwise the virtual machine uses nearly no CPU time from the Mac? I think a goal would be 1% of CPU spent by Parallels on a base Core Duo.

In the Preferences, you could provide a tick box for this:

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[ ] sleep the VM when Parallels window doesn't have the focus

CPU throttle amount: [ 0----|-------------10 ]
Minutues to wait until throttle: [ 2 minutes ][ ^ ]

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That would be an amazing feature!

Jamie Burns.

 

Very nice feature, would love it!

 

Awesome suggestion. This way one could leave the VM running in the background and use it to fire up applications instantly as and when needed. Would make a great replacement to wine.

 

Yes, that is why I registered here to say too.

I have the GA version, bought and paid for and I think it's fantastic, atlhough even running a 2GHz Macbook with 2GB of RAM, I still find it troubling that it uses so much CPU power when idle.

What I do is to return to window mode (I always run full sceen via Virtue Desktop) and then pause the VM if I know I won't be using it for a while, but that is not an ideal method as I need to change from full screen to window and use the menu to pause the VM.

If it is not possible to provide what the OP is asking for in the next release, would it be simpler and quicker (as an interim option) to provide more customisable key binding functions i.e. if I wanted to pause the VM from within the Guest OS, I could press "alt + shift + F1", "alt + shift + F2" to stop the VM, "alt + shift + F3" to restart the VM for exmaple.

I think that would be a large help to those of us that use a Guest OS in full screen mode.

Regards

 

This would make automatic daily backups possible through Super Duper, too, which is what I desperately need.