5160 Significantly slower

F

fso

Member
I installed 5160 last night and found it to be significantly slower operating inside Windows XP - compared to 4560.

The mac side does show Parallels is taking up less CPU.

I have changed the virtual machine setting (under Advanced tab) to optimise for the virtual machine, but it is still the same.

Any suggestions? Any tweaks to get the speed back. I didn't mind the higher CPU utilisation in 4560.
 
This is really strange, the performance should be increased with this update and a lot of reports from our customers confirm that.
Could you please provide some details on your VM:
- amount of total memory your Mac has and the type of Mac
- amount of memory you've allocated to the VM
- total reserved memory limit for Parallels under "Preferences"
- is VT-x turned on for the VM
- have you re-installed Parallels Tools after update?
 
Thanks for the response.
I have 2 Gb of physical RAM running on MPR.
VM running under BootCamp

Memory allocated for VM: 1GB
Under Preferences -> Memory:
Adjust memory: Automatic
Virtual memory preallocation: not enabled
VM Settings -> Options -> Advanced
Acceleration: High
VT-x support: Enabled
Optimize better performance: VM

Parallels Tools was automatically installed properly after the upgrade.
 
Try manually setting the Reserved Memory Limit to maximum and set VM memory to 320 MB, check if performance increases. Please keep in mind that giving Windows too much memory doesn't always lead to performance boost.
 
Thanks.

After changing the memory settings, now seems faster - may be just needed to resave settings. But the screen refresh still seems to be a bit slower.
 
Not sure whether it is my imagination - increasing the video memory from 16Mb to 32 Mb on the VM settings seems to give me back the speed I had with 4560.
 
Maybe, maybe not. Whatever it is, 16 MB VRAM is paltry. Especially considering it isn't grabbing from the graphics card, but rather the RAM.
 
fso said:
A noticeable slowdown is switching between windows inside Windows - alt-tabbing.
Click to expand...

I noticed the slower window switch speed also but with Vista as the guest OS. I already had my video memory set to 32MB. I've also noticed that the screen res looks strange. The fonts look smaller in some apps (eg Windows Mail)! I'm running in Coherence mode (as I was before the upgrade to 5160) so not sure why its different now (latest 5160 tools/drivers installed in Windows). The final strange thing I noticed was every so often when switching between Windows apps Parallels drops out of Coherence and into Single Window mode. Clicking the Coherence button again fixes it but its pretty annoying.
 
Yes Im thinking about rewind to 4560 cuz I have to wait alot for the xp to load when I switch from OSX to XP, never the other way!
I have never seen that in 4560 it was so smooth then.....
 
Parallels Support - is it possible to revert back to 4560 by just reinstalling that version on top of 5160? 4560 was much better after having used 5160 for almost a week.

5160 does feel slower, and I have had a few crashes and warning messages saying my video memory was not enough - never had that with 4560.
 
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