PD 3.0 Seems slow using Boot Camp

I downloaded the trial edition last night. While I was messing around with it, I noticed that it seemed very slow to start and shut down my VM. IS this because I am using my Boot Camp partition?

Should I just remove my Boot Camp partition, will this speed things up. I downloaded Parallels so I wouldn't have to wait to use Windows. I only use Windows XP for Yahoo Messenger and some work with ArcGIS. Any help would be greatly appericated.

FYI: For reference I am on a 2.16Ghz C2D Macbook/120GB/1GB RAM

Thanks!

 

In my experience, 1GB is not enough to run both MacOSX and Windows XP simultaneously. 768MB seems to be a good amount of memory for XP (depending on what you are running, you might need more) -- so you should install an extra 1GB in your Macbook if you want to run XP via Parallels so that OSX still has 1GB or so to itself.

 

Mine too

Okay, I'm running a 2.0 Core Duo iMac with 2 GB of RAM. It's still incredibly slow (like, Virtual PC kinda slow). I'm also using a boot camp image on the trial version of PD 3.0. I've tried optimizing for both the virtual machine and for Mac OS X, but I could not tell a difference. Any ideas?

 

Try turning off windows disk sharing, reinstalling parallels tools with the new features not installed, disabling sound if not needed, and set USB autoconnect off; that seems to have worked on a friends PD 3.0...

 

I found it to be slow like noromaru describes when I had 1GB in my MacBook Pro, but as soon as I upgraded to 2GB I found it to be smooth as silk.

Of course, you can't leave Windows with only 256MB of RAM, so be sure to set the VM to have more than 512MB (as I said before, 768MB is a good amount for running simple things like Office). The only thing I find slow is sharing files with the VM. I am also running off my Boot Camp partition and find it to be nearly as fast as running in Boot Camp (again, for simple things, like Office).

 

Not for me

Hi,

I have a mac 1.66GHz Mac mini with 2GB RAM. I use it all day long booting from Boot Camp as an XP machine, driving a 24" display at 1920x1200. I am so impressed at how well my Mac runs XP that my boss just ordered himself a maxxed out Macbook Pro with 4GB RAM. He also bought parallels. I downloaded PD 3.0 to check it out so I can help him when he gets his Macbook. OMG, it is just so slow. For nearly a year I have just been so pleased at how fast my Mac is as a Mac and how fast it runs XP too. PD 3.0 no matter how I configured it just was not a fit for me. I could get it to do 1920x1200 for XP, but it was excruciating how slow OS X booted and the mouse feel I just couldn't get right in XP. On top of that, I use XP so heavily that I can't do any work in Parallels. I'm a remote DBA and I sometimes need 3 separate Virtual PC's running different VPNs to 3 different customers simultaneously. Can't even run one in Parallels, which I kind of understand. After all that would be a mac emulating a PC emulating another PC, so it just doesn't work for me. To me Parallels is like having a Bentley, a Ferrari, tow hitches on both, and a magic button. You can tow one car with the other and the magic button instantly switches between which car is the hauler and which is the hauled. To my way of driving, I just don't enjoy the experience of either if I still have to tow the other. I'd rather just go home and switch cars.

Just my .02

 

the problem is not RAM, it's the hard disk

The ability to boot a Boot Camp partition into Parallels was added due to popular demand. However, in practicality, it is not an ideal solution when it comes to performance.

When you run a Boot Camp installation via Parallels, you now have 2 operating systems running of the same hard disk concurrently. Since the hard disk is the slowest part of the system to begin with, doing this causes OSX and XP to fight over access to the drive. You will experience performance issues, particularly when starting and shutting down the virtual machine. Throwing more RAM at the problem isn't going to help, since it's the disk that's in conflict.

Therefore, running a Boot Camp install, while convenient, is not a method I would recommend for benchmarking the performance of Parallels.

Try running with a virtual disk, you will see vastly improved performance.

 

A virtual disk still uses the real hard disk and two os's still have to share that single hard disk. The OP needs more RAM.