Some Disappointments with Parallels VM-XP

I am running V.b5 on a 20" iMac with 1GB of RAM.

Windows runs OK, considering....

However, if I keep XP running in the background, the OS X programs slow down considerably. This is especially the case with Rosetta programs such as Office 2004. It seems to make little difference whether XP is running in a minimized window or in sleep mode. If I need XP only occasionally as is the case, it becomes more expedient for me to power it off entirely. Then, things pick up dramatically on the OS X side.

However, this requires me to re-start Parallels, then re-start XP, stop the Scandisk utility which runs every time I re-start, and then wait until XP is ready to go.

At this point, other than file transfer, I wonder what Parallels buys me over Boot Camp? At least in Boot Camp I know that XP is running at top speed as well as OS X.

Can I do anything to improve this?

 

How much memory did you give the VM? At 1GB ram, your system might simply be running out of resources with Parallels, Office and Rosetta running at the same time. Have you looked at iStatpro output in that situation?

I have a MacBook Pro with 2G and am running Parallels with 768MB, Entourage, Powerpoint, Firefox and MSMessenger at the same time and don't perceive any noticable slowdown.

Dirk

 

Hi Paul.

Don't know if I can help much or not but I'll try. From my experience, any Rosetta program really takes it's toll on OS X. Let's face it, it's chomping alot of time off the cpu. XP while doing something productive doesn't really like to play in a sandbox with less than 1Gig of RAM. I have a 20" iMac and had 1 Gb of ram to start off with. XP ran really well under Parallels with ~600 Mb of ram allocated for the VM. I ended up upgrading to two Gigs of ram and all I can say is wow. It really is a nice combo with XP (1 Gb of Ram) and OSX ( 1 Gb remaining). If you're using Office 2k4 under Rosetta, you may want to think to upgrade your RAM. I bought mine from Crucial for ~150 bucks. I'll try to run a Rosetta application tonight while running XP and post my results for you. I don’t think anyone would argue that upgrading your RAM is a bad idea or not worth the money.

- "At this point, other than file transfer, I wonder what Parallels buys me over Boot Camp? At least in Boot Camp I know that XP is running at top speed as well as OS X."

I don't believe you can compare the two. They really are different approaches. Parallels enables you to run a Virtual machine from within OSX – totally different approach from dual booting. I find that Parallels is nice for my CAD/CAM applications (which don’t run under OSX). I can pop in and out of the two environments very quickly. If I were to do this in bootcamp, I’d have to reboot, do my CAD/CAM work, reboot back into OSX. What a pain! As far as the speed of XP within the virtual machine, XP runs faster in Parallels than my 3.2 Ghz machine running XP natively. I really cannot complain about the speed of XP in OSX. The only reason I can think of using bootcamp is to play games designed for Windows. Other than graphic intensive applications, I can not think of a reason why one would not use Parallels. It’s just too convenient.

 

How about pausing the virtual machine when you're not using it, instead of powering it down? Will that do the trick?

Ultimately, though, what a solution like Parallels buys you is the convenience of being able to swtich back and forth between OS's at will, and the ability to run processes in both OS's at the same time. For example, I was doing some work in Windows a little while ago, when I received an email---in Mac OSX. With a couple of keypresses (thanks to Virtue Desktops) I was able to switch right over and read my mail, and return to Windows for work when I finished.

In exchange for that convenience, you give up performance, particularly on the Guest OS, and increase your memory requirements. That's a trade I am more than willing to live with for my application; but if you do not feel the same way, then BootCamp is your solution.

 

Paul,
I think others have said what I'm oging to say. BootCamp and PW are completely different animals. If you want to run Windows at top speed just use Bootcamp or better yet just go get a cheap PC. I think most of us are using a solution like PW cause we have an occasional need to run PC based programs or we are just geeks who want a lot of OSes on our machines, and PW offers tremendous convenience. It will never run at full speed ahead, it just isn't designed to do that. Yo have to remember with OSX , Rosetta and a VM running you are asking those poor little cores to do a heck of a lot of work, especially Rosetta. Rosetta is a massive resource hog. If you think about it its really doing a lot of the same kind of stuff that PW is doing. Its abstracting a whole CPU architecture and basically translating a PowerPC on the fly. yes its a pretty nifty piece of software but it just a mammoth resource hog. You asking those little cores to run OSx in an x86 architecture, to run a Windows VM on an x86 architecture AND then on top of that to emulate a PowerPC architecture in software. Wow! That's just a lot of work.
More memory is your only real option to try and speed things up a little. But even that is going to go only so far.

Cheers,
Pw

 

What do you have running on Windows XP? It looks like something is running flat-out in XP...

1. In XP, open Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del and choose Task Manager button). Click on the Performance tab and look at CPU utilization. It should be in the single-digit % area. If its *not*, click the Processes tab and find out who is consuming all the CPU time.

2. Assuming it is in the single digits, try running Activity Monitor in OS X and see who/what is grabbing all the CPU time. This might be PW, in which case you might have found a bug in PW.

You also mentioned that everytime you state XP it runs a disk check; this should *not* happen unless you are not doing a clean shut-down. Also, what file system are you using in XP? NTFS handles these kinds of things much better than FAT.

--Tim