I have Parallels 6.0.12092, running on a MacBook Pro 2.5 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of ram. I have both Win 7 and XP vms. Both of them are slow as molasses. Most of the time I'm in Win 7, and when I go to, say, restart, Parallels is so slow I get "not responding" messages from Windows (eventually it does respond). Just now I logged in and it took about 5 minutes before I was able to launch IE. Once clicking the icon, another 3 minutes before I was able to type in a URL. It's ridiculous. Activating from suspend usually takes 2-3 minutes before the desktop appears, and another minute or two before I can click on an icon to launch something. Usually when I do that it takes a bunch more time until the app actually launches. I just quit IE and relaunched it, and it took 20 seconds until I was able to enter a URL. It definitely takes a LOT longer when starting up or waking from suspend. I have 1 GB Ram allocated to the VM. I tried less and turning on the Hypervisor but that just dragged the whole computer down. Previous versions of Parallels have been similarly slow. Running iStat Menus, it shows I have about 25% of my memory free right now. Only a few apps running on the Mac side - Firefox, Photoshop, BBEdit, Mail. Running fewer apps doesn't seem to affect it. A friend who's running Parallels on an old black MacBook (not pro) says hers is a lot faster than mine. What should I do? Bail out and get a real Windows machine? - Bob
Hummmm, with a core2duo I would assign one core to the vm. 1,5 GB RAM for Win 7 should work fine. Best performance for the VM is achieved with 'faster virtual machine', 'enable adaptive hypervisor' and 'tune Windows for speed' settings on the VM's optimization tab. My Win 7 VM needs just about 15 seconds to start. Sure, mine is a 2010 Mac Book Pro with a i7, but my other machine (a 2007 Mac Book Pro with 2,33 Ghz C2D) works decent too. Are your vm's transported from physical Windows machines or fresh installs within Parallels? Maybe a drivers problem. Did you try to remove and reinstall Parallels tools?
Slow Loading of Virtual Machine I had a similar problemd and I am usiing MbP 2011 with 8gb ram. I found a lot of programs in the startup folder were loading. I pared mine down so almost nothing was loaded and it really sped it up more than any other change I made.
