Windows 11 VM runs slow

Discussion in 'Parallels Desktop on a Mac with Apple silicon' started by PJ1, Dec 17, 2021.

  1. 沈明明

    沈明明 Junior Member

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    I have the same problem. I sent a technical report a month ago. The technical department has received this problem and will update and fix it in subsequent versions, but I have not received any update notification yet. I hope it can be resolved as soon as possible.
     
  2. MarcoW2

    MarcoW2 Junior Member

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    This to me, sounds like a different issue since mine froze without showing high CPU anywhere. My previously mentioned 7-steps seemed to resolve it in my Windows10 and Windows11 OS.
     
  3. MarcoW2

    MarcoW2 Junior Member

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    Another symptom, since my freezes seem to be back again. The Control Center does not update the preview of my Windows Desktop when it is ran in full screen.
     
  4. NicoloC

    NicoloC Bit poster

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    I've got a MacBook Air M1 with 16GB of ram.
    I've found that Windows 10 is performing well, while windows 11 is terrible. I already tried reinstalling Windows 11 many times, but it was still garbage.
    My configuration on both VM is 4 cores and 8gb of ram.
    In some videos on YouTube (like ) I've seen that you were able to give to the VM 8 cores, but in the configuration page I can only assign 4 max. Is it still possible? How?

    Also, unfortunately it seems like windows 10 insider preview is expired... so only who hasn't upgraded can still use it.
    Does anyone have another method to install windows 10 for arm?
     
  5. MarcoW2

    MarcoW2 Junior Member

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    Just discovered that mdworker was continuesly eating cpu. So, I checked the SpotLight settings, and found nothing was excluded from indexing. Hence I added my VirtualMachines folder to not be indexed. The mdworker instantly dropped to almost 0%; and my Windows10 seems to working in normal order again. I'll keep watching if anything changes, but this was a silly one.

    (Oh, and I changed the Hypervisor to Apple .. maybe the combination?)
     
    ThiloS1 likes this.
  6. MarcoW2

    MarcoW2 Junior Member

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    :) after two days of working having excluded the virtual machine folder from getting indexed by spotlight, it seems to hold up extremely well. So it appears my problem is definitely solved by this "discovery".
     
    AndrewH11, SamS4 and EnricoA like this.
  7. JunL2

    JunL2 Bit poster

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    Same issue, cpu usage 100% on my mba m1 8g while no user's application was running. When I firstly installed VM on Sep 2021, everything is very well. But after some updates, VM can not be used at all. Hoping for fix.
     
  8. EnricoA

    EnricoA Bit poster

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    Hi Marco,
    could you share with us how you excluded the Virtual Machine folder from getting indexed? I've added an exclusion in "Preferences -> Spotlight -> Privacy" and dropped the VM main Folder (the one with the VM inside). Is this right?
     
  9. EnricoA

    EnricoA Bit poster

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    SOLVED SOLVED SOLVED!

    Damn guys, the solution provided by @MarcoW2 is literally PERFECT. THANKS MATE!!

    Just navigate through: "Preferences -> Spotlight -> Privacy" and insert your VM Folder (the one that contain the .pvm file) and that's it. Don't even need to reboot the VM or Mac (but it's better to do it, of course).

    Windows running nice and smooth now.
     
    AndrewH11 and SamS4 like this.
  10. Markus12

    Markus12 Bit poster

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    Thanks guys! That worked very well for me too. Win11 performance improved significantly and I can finally continue using it. But, I had to restart both, the Mac and the VM.
    Thanks
     
  11. BalazsB

    BalazsB Bit poster

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    Thank you all, it looks like it's working! Parallels support is a monkey with a cymbal, so disappointing, just repeating a useless article.
     
  12. MikeG15

    MikeG15 Bit poster

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    Thank you very much @MarcoW2 and @EnricoA! That Spotlight trick worked for me. I have an M1 iMac with only 8gb of ram. Since the update to Monterey I felt like I was running Windows on my PC from 1994! So slow!!! I also realized that I hadn't excluded from Spotlight indexing two DropBox accounts from work that have 20TB of files. ‍♂️
     
  13. SirCodesALot

    SirCodesALot Member

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    @MarcoW2 thank you so much! I've been trying to figure out what was causing my Windows 11 VM to freeze shortly after startup. I didn't think of uninstalling/reinstalling the Parallels Tools. I wonder if there was something left behind between an upgrade to Parallels and when Windows 10 upgraded itself to Windows 11...
     
  14. MatthiasE5

    MatthiasE5 Hunter

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    I also noticed improvments when I configure it for 2 CPUs instead of 4. With 4 the sound was choppy.
     
  15. JulieL2

    JulieL2 Bit poster

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    I can confirm that Windows 11 [PRO WITH LICENSE] (virtual machine) is VERY sluggish and has other strange behaviors (ie, display is large and no longer fits on the screen) on a MacBook Pro 2019, 16GB ram and 1T SSD using a standard installation of Windows 11 (rather than the Insider version necessary for the M1 Mac). I replaced my M1 MacBook and gave up Parallels for 6 months and used Bootcamp for this reason alone; needless to say, QUITE frustrating! Where can I get personalized support??!!
     
  16. JulieL2

    JulieL2 Bit poster

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    PS: Running Monterey as well....
     
  17. JulieL2

    JulieL2 Bit poster

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    Is there a way of reinstalling the windows 11 VM without losing all data and settings in the process??? Seems like such a big pain!
     
  18. MatthiasE5

    MatthiasE5 Hunter

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    I am using Windows 11 ARM (final version, not insider) on M1 with Big Sur and performance is acceptable. I noticed that I have to restart sometimes because it becomes somewhat sluggish / unresponsive, but I am not sure what the cause of this is. It's not a big deal. I am still using 2 CPUs and it's going ok. I think the cause for the issues might be for me that I am using Firefox for Mac on MacOS with loads of tabs which competes for the RAM with windows. I do recommend Parallels 17 latest version, with Windows 11 ARM.

    Generally speaking I would suggest to get a MacBook Pro with at least 32 GB RAM and M1 processor. If the new macbook airs 2022 have more than 16 gb, I would get those with more than 16 and M2. I would also generally recommend using Windows ARM on Apple Silicon /M1/M2. The reason for this is that it is easily transferable (always backup the full PVM file to external media, regularly, and export the TPM key to external too. I am using a Samsung T5 for that, plus a SanDisk USB stick to do incremental backups with macrium reflect (the latter non-bootable, just for data safety). If it is Monterey that is causing the issue, then I guess getting an M1 MBA is the best, that is using Big Sur.

    With the VM file, you can easily migrate to another macbook anytime which is a big plus. And migrating MacBook is easy with CCC.

    In order to find out if there is an issues with Monterey vs Big Sur on M1, somebody would have to confirm that after updating to Monterey, things get worse and it's not a placebo.

    My generaly approach to MacOS updates is that I keep the previous version (in the current case Big Sur) until it is not longer supported, or until the successor (Monterey) is not longer the latest OS, i.e. I would stay behing around one year. That way you always have a stable system that is also secure. Make sure you check for updates of Big Sur regularly (security updates), they are still being delivered and you need to check for them manually (sadly). You need to click the blue font to get to the option to update Big Sur instead of upgrading to Monterey, in MacOS settings.
     
  19. PhilipC9

    PhilipC9 Bit poster

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    3
    Yes you can go into Settings and in the security section can reset the PC and choose to keep files and settings
     
  20. carlosrodzbotet

    carlosrodzbotet Hunter

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    Could you give more details on how to do this? I updated to Parallels 17.1.4 and now it locks up. I didn't change one thing and Parallels support sucks. The last thing they told me was to reinstall Windows but haven't answered any more questions. I don't want to have to install all the windows programs and settings again, it took weeks to get it to work correctly with the last version. I think this will be my last Parallels if they can;t give support and every time I update it stops working.

    Windows 7 on
    macOS Monterey
    Version 12.4
    MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015)
    Processor 2.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core 17
    Memory 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
    Startup Disk MAC 1TB SSD
    Graphics Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB
     

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