Reading through the forums has shown a conglomerate of things to try. Vista RC1 is actually running credibly, with a few odd caveats. First and foremost -- Patience. Parts of it are sloooow as molasses, but after installing, the speed comes up. First off, download Parallels build 1922. This gives, when setting up a "Vista (Experimental)" selection for the OS to install. Someone's post noted that to get around the ACPI problem, first install XP using the "Vista (Experimental)" selection. This installs an ACPI hook somewhere between the virtual hard drive and the Parallels config, giving it ACPI compatibility. Be sure you have set the VM's memory to a minimum of 512MB of RAM, I've set mine to 640MB to give a little headroom. When XP is installed, go back and set the Boot Order to CD-Hard Drive-Floppy. The config file, having now installed an ACPI link, now permits booting the Vista DVD or ISO. (If using a DVD, then DEFINITELY burn it a 1X or 2X, not faster. Wasted many disks to learn that Redmond is actually on the mark on this point.) Shut down from inside of Win XP, and Restart. Vista install will boot up (tho slowly). Do a clean install, let it format your hard drive to clean out XP. The ACPI cabability stays on. Shut the VM down. Reset the Boot Order to Hard Drive-CD-Floppy. Restart and install. It will be VERY Slow. ••• Going back to old Mac IIcx 68030 days, when needing photo quality was needed, one purchased EXPENSIVE NuBus 24-bit video cards. But one used it for critical viewtime, and imaging to 35mm slides. When work needed to get done, one switched back to 8-bit resolution. Why this explanation? ••• Well---- something that really helped performance when getting Vista going, is to change its default 32-bit setting for monitors to 16-bit and applying it. For general (and in this instance, experimental) usage, 32-bit is way overkill, 24-bit is great, but 16-bit is plenty adequate, and reduces to hogging of the CPU. Still better than 8-, 4-, or 1-bit. Speed up other things by going into the System Control Panel, selecting "Advanced System Setting, go to "Visual Effects" tab, and turn off different animations, shadowing, etc. Shut Down from inside Vista, Restart again, and run the install of the Parallels Tools. NOTE: It takes a VERY long time for this to install -- Be PATIENT !! After it is done, and you Shut Down and Reboot, Vista will be nice and Speedy ! ! NOW if only I could figure out how to get the Shared folder feature to work... Vista doesn't have a Show "Entire Network", so the Parallels Shared Folders share does not show up. And Parallels Shared folders does not show up in that Parallels Tools Center in Vista, so did it actually install? Does one try to find out where these items are in XP, copy them, and see if by chance one can place them in Vista, and have them work. Hmm.
you should be able to just goto \\.psf in the explorer address bar or the text entry on the start menu. that's \ \ . psf the \\. kinda runs together when looking at these pages, hehe.
Sharing and More Resolved... As per someone's suggestion, it was instructed to set the VM tools on the CD ISO to Win XP SP2 compatibilities in the execute files' properties. Doing so, I uninstalled the tools (an approx 15 minute process), then reinstalled direct from the execute file (not from the OSX install item in Parallels). I waited about 20 minutes for the dialogs to start to come up. Then I did a CUSTOM install, and responded to all the security alerts, rebooted, and ALL the tools show up now in Parallels Tools Center in Vista. Ta Dah ! ! It seems even faster than when I had originally installed the tools.
I didn't have any problems installing Vista RC1 Build 5728 under Parallels1922 RC2. I have a MacBook Pro 2GB. I set up a new VM with Vista (Experimental). I set the CD to point to the ISO of Vista and booted. Vista started, ran the installation and it completed in about 30 minutes. I started the Run Parallels Tools command to mount the CD image and started the install tools. It ran fine (without having to set the XP emulation level) and it setup the Tools control panel and the Shared Folders command. At that point, Shared Folders worked perfectly. In about 50% of the cases, the install tools didn't update the drivers properly so to make sure the Parallels drivers are installed, you should manually update the video controller, network controller and mouse driver. If you've not done that before, you just need to open the Device Manager, open the device and click Update Driver. Select the proper directory for the driver you need which is located on the E: drive (the Tools image drive). That's it - 40 minutes from nothing to working Vista. I find 1152x720 at 16bbp the best resolution. Along with VirtueDesk and the new light sensor desk switch, you can really impress the troups by switching from OS X to Vista with a wave of the hand.
Vista RC2 (5744) I installed Vista RC2 (Build 5744) yesterday on my iMac Core 2 Duo - it took 20 minutes from start to finish. To install it, I just created a new VM for Vista, attached the ISO of the install DVD to the new VM and booted it and installed from there - no problems, and very quick to install.
Vista RC2 (5744) Running fine on my MBP 17 inch after install from a DVD (I burnt the ISO download) using the Vista experimental settings choice on Parallels 1922 RC2 Minor things seen so far.. Parallels Tools seems only to have a couple of things working, no shared folders! - and I can't get the mouse out of the Vista window wthout Ctrl-Alt. It seems that the CPU load is about two times higher than Parallels running XP - showing 104% in Activity Monitor eben when doing nothing. Chris
Vista RC2 and PD 1922 You can actually boot into the Vista install disk directly from the ISO file without burning a DVD - by setting the CD/DVD option for Emulation to "Use Image file" and pint it to the file. Still needed to set the compatibility for PD Tools to XP, but everything installed and now have full us of shared folders and the cursor etc. CHeck the PD Tools program in Windows to make sure all compoents installed and reinstll if needed. The only issue so far is that the audio is choppy.
