2009 13" MBP battery problems (service battery alert and prl_vm?)

J

jonathan_david

Hunter
hi all.

i have a 2009 MBP that is nearing the end of the applecare warranty and it is in for repair.

it the past i had the problem with a prl_vm process but i have been upgrading every time i can (and shelling out big cash for the upgrades).

the computer never has gotten more than about 1 1/2 hours of life surfing safari with no other software or startup items. i installed parallels 5 immediately upon purchasing this machine and am now on parallels 8 i believe.

recently the "service battery" warning went off and right now they have replaced the battery and the logic board and it has failed the hardware test so they are sending it off to some other mac facility for further testing.

is it at all possible this has anything to do with my installing parallels?

tia
 
I can assure you, Parallels has nothing in common with you Mac failure. PD obviously eats power when running virtual machine - but this is everything it does about the battery
 
hi. thanks. i have been told that if i am using too much RAM and the computer is heating up hot and the fan is blowing hard (all symptoms i have had in the past using parallels) that i can prematurely kill my battery.

i have added an additional a mx 8 GB of ram in my machine but would you disagree with this reply on the mac forums:

"When you get the computer back use activity Monitor as described in this article to examine your typical memory use:

Using Activity Monitor to read System Memory and determine how much RAM is being used

You may be trying to do too much in too little real RAM memory. This will run the Hard drive too much, overheat the machine, run the fan too much, and ruin the battery life."

THANKS
 
it is always advised to assign less than 50% of RAM to your VM - if you had more that that, your Mac could have hard times)
 
i have 3.5 of 8 total GB allocated to Parallels. any insight into the original post based upon this?

the performance of this 2009 MBP has always been absolutely atrocious and i installed parallels almost immediately upon buying it. OTOH, mac tech tells me that it is passing their tests (albeit their battery test is at 50% screen brightness which means i can't read anything and with Safari, iTunes, Activity Monitor and Pages on with all of them doing nothing.

also, hard blowing fan and hot, hot, hot computer shortly after buying it doesn't make me feel good about the whole situation...
 
hi yana yana.

also, can you please answer this question?

i have a mid 2009 mac book pro with 8 GB of RAM in it and i have allocated 3.5 GB of ram to parallels.

would you also advise ONLY using the virtual machine OR mac software or would you expect i should be able to use both to some extent?

i mean, say if i simply /open/ parallels and windows 7 while i am working in mac OS...?

THANKS
 
RAM consumption does not heat up a computer at all. It's all about CPU load. So no matter how much RAM is full, your Mac won't get hotter. But naturley when there is much in the RAM there is also much to do for the CPU. The CPU gets warm under load and that's when the fans run faster.
But this does not in any way harm the battery. Parallels Desktop is still "software", even if it runs cosely integrated with OSX, will never and technically can not harm your hardware.

The batterie can however die and this is nothing to really worry about, Apple will replace it even free or for a charge. Nothing to worry about if you have a backup.
It's the same as with harddrives, they can also fail without any software to blame.
 
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hi man.

thanks.

originally the computer ran extremely /hot/ on the underside and the power pack heated up in an alarming way and the fan would blow extremely loud. presumably you are saying this was due to the CPU usage being used too much?

at some point i then put 8 GB of RAM in to try and free it up a bit.

i mean, part of what i am just trying to determine is if this model mac - with 8 GB of RAM in it - simply cannot run mac os software and run parallels at the same time. sometimes i think this model can't even run MAC SOFTWARE without getting extremely poor battery life and lots of beachball hangs but i am also wondering if any of this has to do with parallels since i cannot seem to run this software on this machine with any reasonable performance at all despite spending about three years troubleshooting all of this...

: (
 
From reading your other posts I would say you have a lot of programs/services running in the background.
 
hi. thanks.

i am planning on buying a new computer but it would be helpful to know if this computer is having a problem and/or if parallels is something i should continue using.

if i have no startup items listed under users and groups is this sufficient for making sure i don't have a lot of programs and processes running in the background? or is this an issue of there being software that i have loaded that needs to run various processes and that without even turning on the software (or having anything in the startup items) that THIS is the reason for poor performance?

or are you saying that if i have no startup items that the poor performance in parallels is related to having MAC SOFTWARE open?

THANKS!
 
I have really nothing else useful to add, except that that computer with those specifications should run Parallels and other Mac programs simultaneously just fine.
 
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With 8Gb of RAM, I found allocating 4Gb to Parallels was too high - 2Gb seemed to work better for me.

I could increase this to 4Gb after I had installed 16Gb of RAM.

Have you run Task Manager to see if a Windows program is running the CPU at 100%?

BTW, the battery in my 2011 MBP has died too. :(
 
hi gd mr.

thank you.

it feels like this has pretty much been an endless task of trying to track down elusive problems since the day i bought the machine and installed paralells (5? 6?). i've upgraded almost desperately upon new releases.

i have a new battery and new logic board after going in to mac under applecare as of last week.

yesterday i turned off all programs, made sure no items were in startup processes, shut down the computer. turned the computer on, checked for no startup processes, turned on parallels and started timing the startup time. at about 2 or 3 minutes i saw simply a blank grey windows screen (my background) with no icon. i waited 10 minutes and shut down windows and restarted the virtual machine and i eventually got into windows. i am simply trying to test how long it takes to start up at this point.

also, it seems like parallels tools drops off every three to four months and i have to re-install this on both my systems.

presumably the prl_vm is no longer taking up 100% CPU and burning up my machine - was there ever an explanation of what this was or when/how it was fixed (?!).

also, from what i am hearing you run mac software and parallels on your 2011 as long as you set the RAM for parallels at 2 GB with 8 total or 4 GB with 16 total?

finally your machine is a 15" i assume?! or what are the specs...? how long is startup? does parallels tools drop off periodically?

THANKS
 
I have not got round to getting a new battery for my MBP, as I have been using a mac Mini instead.

I have been using Parallels for 5-6 years with no major problems. I have VM Fusion also, but prefer Parallels.

The Mini has 16Gb and a 256Gb SSD - mainly to run Parallels.

It takes about ~ 45 secs to load Windows 7 from scratch, and ~ 10 secs to resume from a suspended state.
 
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