I'm using snow leopard on Parallels 5 XP Guest OS. My room temperature is 26 degrees (living in the Caribbean). I have a room fan blowing onto the back of the laptop, which has air running under it, since it's off the table - if I'm in OSX running heavy apps (playing movie, running Unison, etc.) the CPU temperature is about 54 degrees. When I startup Parallels with with nothing running in OSX and only running SQL Server and Visual Studio in Parallels my GPU diode and CPU temperature run up to 74 degrees each. Visual Studio stops responding and eventually windows stops working. Rendering my upgrade basically useless. I guess that I need to go back to Parallels Desktop 4. Anybody else having this issue?
Well, not living in the Caribbean but in Europe currently significantly reduces my risk of overheating the CPU Seriously: Have a look at your Activity Monitor and in particular at the swapping activity going on while you're running Parallels. My experience is that if the memory is not properly balanced between the Mac and the VM, either Windows or the Mac OS will engage in heavy swapping activity (ie a lot of virtual memory will be used) which keeps both the CPU and the hard disk real busy, and slows everything down. So, try to reduce your VM's memory to 1024 MB, even though you may have a lot of real RAM on your Mac, and see whether that helps. If so, increase the VM's memory in small steps (64 Mb a time or so) until you find a setting that's tolerable for your specific setup and work environment.
Hello Brian, I have had a couple of problems with random crashes. I have ruled out the temperature as this happens randomly even when the temperature was within normal limits. I am using a macbook pro and stumbled upon fan control... this helped me reduce temperatures. It makes the internal cooling fans run at a certain speed at a certain threshold. Not sure if this would help you. Although potentially with running fans longer at a higher frequency will obviously put extra strain on them, and over time they may need replacing but they should be able to withstand use. go here if you are interested http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/23137
Hi Shaddam, I have 4GB of RAM altogether. I have set both my guest OS to use 2GB. I'll give it a try with 3GB for windows, but since it's windows XP I didn't think it would make much of a difference. I looked in the process explorer in Windows and the processes didn't add up to near 2GB, so I don't think swapping would be a problem. I'll setup SQL server to use less memory and see what happens. Thanks for the ideas.
Thanks for the tip. I'll give it a try. My fan speed is hovering around 2000 according to my iStat Pro widget. I'll give this a try to see if it brings the temperature down.
my fan always hovering around 2000 no matter what temperature it is, I don't think you should worry about it too much. as long CPU isn't working above 70°C it should be fine.
