17" MacBook Pro

S

sechmura

Bit poster
I was a bit surprised to see that a thread on 17" MacBook Pro compatibility hasn't been created.

Has anyone successfuly installed Parallels on the newest 17" MBP yet? My only concern was the resolution settings. Can anyone confirm if 1680 x 1050 is a supported Windows XP resolutions.

There does appear to be some issues with Boot Camp on the 17". Namely, a "hardware not supported" error when trying to install Apple's drivers in Windows XP.
 
I'm running it on a 17" MacBook pro. I'm having some problems with the VM freezing which I am investigating. You can run it full screen @ 1680x1050; in fact you can add custom screen resolutions. I run it at 1630x1000.
 
Thanks

Thanks for the reply. Just needed confirmation that things were working before I installed the latest version of Parallels.
 
Stop your virtual machine.
Edit the VM.
Click on Video.
Check "enable custom screen sizes"
Add the 1630x1000 size.

Start the VM.
Use Display Properties/Settings, and move the screen res slider to find 1630x1000

Enjoy!

One more thing - if the Color Quality is set to 24 bits, the screen will "tear" diagonally. It seems to work only at 16 bits at that resolution setting. I don't know what's up with that.....

Later:

Did some more playing - it seems to be from the "odd" 1630 setting. If I make it 1640x1000 or 1600x1000 all works well at 24 bits color.
 
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Perhaps Parallels guys could either fix the tearing problem altogether, or put some sort of warning about it when using an odd-numbered resolution and 24-bit colour.
 
The performance on my 17" MacBook Pro does not seem to be what I would expect. Is anyone else seeing this? The CPU usage in top or Activity Viewer is not that high, but both Parallels and any other apps I have running at the same time seem to be very slow and sometimes freezes for 10-30 seconds. It seems like it some kind of IO bound problem, but I can't be sure.
 
gkorper said:
The performance on my 17" MacBook Pro does not seem to be what I would expect. Is anyone else seeing this? The CPU usage in top or Activity Viewer is not that high, but both Parallels and any other apps I have running at the same time seem to be very slow and sometimes freezes for 10-30 seconds. It seems like it some kind of IO bound problem, but I can't be sure.
Click to expand...

I would make sure you haven't allocated too much memory to the guest OS. I had pause/delay problems when I pushed my memory usage too high. I'm running with 512M on guest with 2G total and all is good. I have sluggish mouse problems in guest OS (especially at fullscreen) but otherwise it is working well and is very stable. I haven't had a crash in weeks.

17" MacBook Pro, 2G RAM (1G after-market), 120G 5400 RPM drive running Windows 2003, SQL Server 2000, IIS, some proprietary server apps
 
17" MBP runs slower than 15" MBP?

I get varying performance on the 17" and the 15" MacBook depending on the OS but all tested OS's run in stable manner. Here's a rather unscientific report of my findings. I used the exact same drive image on both machines. Both machines are using the exact same software settings and configurations by performing a fresh setup on the 17" and migrating from the 15" using target firewire mode. Only Safari was running with Parallels in both of the test suites.

15" reports:
Windows 2000 SP4 1.2Ghz (512MB allocated)
Windows XP SP2 2.2Ghz (512MB allocated)
Windows 2003 SP1 530Mhz (1024MB allocated)

17" reports:
Windows 2000 2.2Ghz (512MB allocated)
Windows XP SP2 1.3Ghz (512MB allocated)
Windows 2003 SP1 833Mhz (1024MB allocated)

Besides the reported speed, there is a visually noticable difference between Win03 and XP. The cursor drags big time even with the Parallel Tools installed. I would say the speed is roughly equivelant to XP-VPC under the 1.5Ghz PPC. Startup and shutdown varies by pretty much the percentage difference in the reported speed. Therefore, 50 seconds for XP on the 15" is about 90 seconds on the 17" for the same task.

Each test was run twice. On the 15" I started getting out of memory errors when trying to startup a new OS instance even though the OS was reporting only 450MB in use out of 2GB. After quitting and restarting Parallels, the problem went away.

After quitting Parallels, the 17" had about 130MB of additional residual memory still being used (535MB versus 404MB) although they both reported 235MB in use before starting Parallels.

I manually checked the processes and both are consuming varying amounts although the processes are similar. I don't know what all that means but there it is none the less. I'm curious is anyone else is getting results like this.
 
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