After installing Parallels and using it to boot my Windows 7 x64 partition, Parallels somehow during configuration replaced the Windows 7 boot animation with the Windows Vista green bar. This is now what I get went booting directly into Windows as well. I wish it had not done this, and would like to restore the original boot animation. I know running Bootrec.exe /FixBoot from the recovery console will do this on a "standard" PC, but I don't know what affect it might have on a Mac.
Gordon, to restore Windows boot animation open Virtual Machine Configuration, then select Options tab, click Optimization on the left and uncheck Tune Windows for speed checkbox.
I'm not using Boot Camp, just a straight full installation of retail Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit into a Parallels VM. After the first Windows Update (to install a fix for IE8) the Win 7 VM began using the Vista Boot animation. Following your advice above did not work for me; I had to disable BOTH the "Tune Windows for speed" and the "Enable Adaptive Hypervisor" options in order to restore the Windows 7 Boot animation -- and still, occasionally, the VM will revert to the Vista animation, requiring me to go back through configuration to re-enable and then disable the two options. Machine is early 2009 MacBook Pro 17" 2.66 GHz Core Duo, 8 GB Ram, using the NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT video adapter, and Snow Leopard 10.6.1.
More information You know, it would be really great it we could get more information as to what exactly is being changed when one uses the tune windows for speed setting. Especially considering that I use Parallels with a Boot Camp volume, I don't really like that it makes an unspecified number of changes to Windows setting without telling me what they are or how they might effect the Windows environment.
I was rebooting the guest, of course, otherwise how would I be able to see that the boot animation wasn't correct? The only combination of settings that, in my case anyway, consistently result in the correct Win7 boot animation is to leave both the "Enable Adaptive Hypervisor" and "Tune Windows for speed" options disabled. Most of the time simply leaving the "Tune Windows for speed" setting disabled would work, but occasionally, even with "Tune Windows for speed" disabled, the Vista animation would reappear when rebooting unless I also disabled the "Enable Adaptive Hypervisor" setting. So now I just leave both settings disabled. Doesn't seem to result in any noticeable performanc hit, but I'm not doing 3d graphics or other particularly CPU intensive work.
I don't really care about the boot animation, but am interested to know what effect the tuning has on the regular Windows installation (pros and cons, etc.).
OK, that's good to know. So, aside from increasing boot time/decreasing RAM usage while booting, there should be no performance change while using a booted virtual environment?
I found a possible solution in the following thread: https://forum.parallels.com/threads/windows-7-boot-faster-and-changed-logo.272301/
