Make "Pause Parallels when possible" work!

I think enough time has gone by, to either remove this feature or even make it work.

If I'm lucky, PD will pause when a Windows 10 VM is freshly booted. But otherwise rarely. Surely... if there is no main active program, then pause the VM. It's not rocket science.

(Also why in PD 13 do you still show the Taskbar icons on the MenuBar when the machine was paused. This is new - and unwanted - behaviour. As user should have some easy indication whether a VM is paused - and in Coherence mode, not having the windows VM taskbar icons on the Mac Menubar was a great way of knowing. Now I just wait for the fans to start and my MacBook to get warm and then I realise my VM is not paused).

 

Nicolas, the auto-pause works as you described. Moreover, you are right, this is not rocket since because the auto-pause managed by Windows itself. We just intercept its signal and pause VM. No additional logic is implemented. Do you have any ideas how to improve it?

 

I'm sorry I'm replying so late... it's nice to have a reply from a developer and not support! And it was interesting to discover that you hook into Windows' own definition of pause. Sadly, this doesn't seem to be adequate (or maybe Parallels Desktop doesn't always pick it up as it should).

But, yes, I do have a suggestion how to improve this: I believe that if Windows is not running an app that creates an icon in the Mac Dock, then the VM should pause. Mac users who need windows are not (or should not be) running background apps in the VM... Skype, Slack, various cloud file services (Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, etc.) would normally run on the Mac natively. Most users only have the VM for when they need (or want) to run apps only available in Windows -- or I imagine for development and testing, but in such cases they would only fire up the VM when needed. And, in any case, one can disable pause in PD's VM configuration.

Bottom line is that battery life is important. I (and I would imagine most users) do not need a second OS... but rather just some applications on the second OS.

But I appreciate your reply! Thank you.

 

We made some improvements over the last years and Auto-pause seems to wok better now.
I consider this one complete.