Running slow

My wife upgraded her Parallels and complained that it is running very slowly. She only runs it in full screen mode.

When I looked at it, the first thing I noticed is that the Parallels icon in the dock was lit as if it was running. That's very different from my computer where the new Parallels has the light under it in the dock *never* lit, so I also don't know if it is running.

But when we click on it or click on something in the Windows folder in the dock, it takes a long time to start Parallels & Windows XP.

So I bumped video from 128 to 192 and main memory from 636 to 899. I also bumped processors fom one to two, but expect that did nothing.

What else should I to do? It *is* very slow.

 

Howard,

Did you happen to read this thread? http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=95527

Is your problem different from the problems reported by many people in the thread above?

 

Her slowness isn't nearly that extreme.

I keep reading how Parallels 5 is 3x faster, but don't really know what that means. Windows can't load 3 times faster can it?

At any rate, on neither my computer nor my wife's seem to load Windows quickly.

 

It is getting slower, with more times when I have to wait several minutes to do anything. Occasionally it will boot for 20 minutes or more before I kill it.

 

Parallels 5 seems to be running pretty slow when other stuff is happening on your Mac (e.g. other programs are running) when you don't have much memory. I run it on a 2 Gig MacBook Air and when I use Parallels I really can't use any other program. I believe this has to do with how much memory this Parallels version is reserving and how much is left for the Mac. When you try to run Parallels together with a Mac program, the mac will start to swap memory (to me this happens even if I just want to switch to the Finder).


Just shut down everything else before starting up Parallels.

I hope that the next P5 update will include a fix for the memory requirements...

 

Especially with the changes to make integration better (Crystal mode), Parallels would be nice if we could run it the same time as running other stuff.

Or even running iTunes in the background.

But I've been closing Parallels every time I get a chance because I can't afford to wait 5 minutes a dozen times per day for it to do all its swapping.