I finally figured out that it's actually faster to shut down and boot Windows XP than it is to suspend and resume it in Parallels. Plus Parallels doesn't tend to take over my entire machine for brief periods while booting Windows like it does while resuming. Now that I've figured that out, I'm much happier.
Memory You might try lowering the memory of your VM. Obviously a 512 mb VM has to shut down and that will take a long time. If you lower it to something like 256 or even less this might take less time.
Windows with only 256 MB is like a car with four flat tires. I'm perfectly happy to simply shut down and restart Windows each time I need it. It's actually quite fast, only taking maybe 20 seconds to start up and about the same to shut down.
It depends on what you're doing at the point of shutting down. If you're on an airplane that about to land and in the middle of a lot of spreadsheets and Powerpoint editing you might just want to save files, suspend, shut down or sleep the system, then restart it where you left off when you get to your hotel room. There's more to it than starting and stopping - there's getting back to work to consider. dp
Well, in a scenario where I need to get the machine put away in a hurry, I'd just close the lid and put the Mac to sleep. I do agree that there are times where suspend works better, but with it taking more time for me to resume a VM than to boot Windows and re-launch my apps, the latter makes more sense for me.
I agree. Suspending and resuming really take really long times! I find shutting down the VM and then rebooting XP to be a lot faster.
For me it's much faster to do a suspend, because I run several programs that are inter-related and need to be connected together. That whole process takes about two minutes when doing a clean boot. With suspend, it takes only about 30 seconds.
I hope that the next version of Desktop will speed up the suspend function. It is much faster to shutdown and start-up than to suspend resume. I understand that the RAM is being saved/ loaded and that takes time, but it's pretty ridicuuluous that the speed of windows booting/ shutting down beats the suspend/ resume function builkt into the OS. Edd Macbook Pro 2Ghz 2Gb RAM - 916Mb assigned to parallels; just using windows XP SP2 for MS office related work and adobe acrobat work.
Andrew, I was a beta testa for all rounds up until the last one. My parallels installation works flawlessly (touching wood) and didn't want to rock the boat with so many dealines coming up that require I have a functioning copy of adobe accessible. I'm thrilled that the next parallels has quicker suspend/ resume, and will keep checking the boards for RC candidates so I can upgrade 1970 without worry. Thanks for the swift reply!!! Edd.
Hibernate XP (BOOTCAMP) I use a BootCamp partition. When booted to XP, I can Hibernate. Not quite as fast as sleep, but fast. When I go to shut down XP in Parallels, it offers me Hibernation as a shutdown option. Can it do that?
I was excited to use Boot Camp with Parallels, but then with this new beta, suspend is SO FAST that I've completely stopped using the Boot Camp partition. It is completely worth it. On a 2ghz Core Duo MacBook, I think it takes less than 15 seconds to completely come back from a suspended, 512mb session. It takes about the same amount of time to suspend, too. -Tofer
Not to mention that the new Paralles version seems to do the suspend in the background. When I quit parallels it through itself into the background and does its thing. It seems to happen faster then before but regardless it also does it in a much less intrusive way. Very cool.....
