After upgrade to v4, XP Pro extremely slow

I finally got the upgrade to complete successfully; I had not originally read the troubleshooting guide about canceling all the "found new hardware" prompts, but after trying to force it manually it finally went through the complete cycle of logging in automatically to the helper profile, installing the parallels tools, and rebooting a few times to complete it.

But now, I'm noticing that the VM is extremely slow. I'm running:

MacOS 10.5.5
Parallels 4 upgraded from 3
MacBook Pro 2.2GHz Intel Core Duo
4GB RAM
1 internal 120GB HD
Not running bootcamp, booting from hard drive image

The performance of the mouse and keyboard are fine, it's just taking a really long time to launch applications. Reboot takes forever before everything is loaded. I even tried increasing to 2.5GB RAM allocated to the VM, as well as two CPUs, and have tried hypervisor on and off. Nothing is taking up a lot of CPU in the windows task manager, it's just really slow. Any ideas?

 

Same here!

Video slow, start of apps slow. Even with Parallels Tools installed!

 

Try rebooting your Mac. I noticed the same thing until I reboot my Macbook and now it runs super fast and CPU/RAM usage is less than PD3. Sure you tried but in case you haven't...worth a shot.

 

Installing Windows 98 - my CPU is pegged between 80 and 100% since I started running the VM. Doesn't matter if the host is idle or not.

My mouse jumps around all over the place - anyone else get that?

Any able to suggest any ways (because rebooting didn't work) to reduce CPU load? prl_vm_app is the culprit.

Thanks.

 

Re-booting the Mac does seem to improve things but it comes back after a while and everything goes SLOOOOOW again. Today it took about three minutes to resume Windows XP Pro and everything was unresponsive during this time. I have tried optimising for both OS X and Virtual Machine.

Such a shame because PD3 always worked great for me and I'm really regretting paying for the upgrade.... I thought it was going to make everything slicker and give me proper 3D Graphics but it's barely usable. Hope it gets fixed soon.

I am...
OS X 10.5.5
Parallels Desktop 4.0.3522
Model Identifier: MacBook2,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.16 GHz
Memory: 2 GB

I have given 760MB to the guest OS which was fine in PD3
Video has 128MB of the 256 total.

 

Hi Sdi,

I've got the same set up you have looking at your system specs and I have exactly the same problem with XP Home. Parallels 4 will run fine but then after a bit of use XP just becomes incredibly slow and non responsive. I just have to leave it for a few minutes and then reboot my whole machine to make it useable again. I was all excited about this version but not so much anymore Cheers.

 

I think the slowness may be due to Parallels Tools. I had similar experience.
Reboot your Mac, start VM and the reinstall parallels tools (It may take a while if VM is slow. Once Tools is fully loaded, the VM should speed up greatly.)

You may also want to Uninstall Parallels Tools in Windows Apps before doing this.

Hope this helps.

 

Thanks for the suggestion, I had re-installed Parallels Tools already but have tried again following your instructions to the letter!

All still seems a bit sluggish but will monitor it for a few days.

Thanks again.

 

Change from 2 processors to 1 helped!

Actually, it resolved the issue more or less. I got the same speed as before.
Now I would like to get the "better" speed of 4.0...

 

Since I have Parallels 3 installed currently (have only had for 3 weeks) - will I have to re-install my Win XP Pro once I install version 4.0?
Also, anyone know who to get my free upgrade since I bought version 3 in Oct 08 - Parallels seems to make it quite difficult to get an upgrade key for free when eligible.

 

What do you mean by, "Uninstall Parallels Tools in Windows Apps"?

I am using PD4 with a Boot Camp partition of Windows XP SP3. My system has 2 x 2.8Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xenon processors and 6GB of RAM. I've dedicated various combinations of 2-3GB RAM and 1-2 processors to the VM, yet it's running extremely slow. It takes at least twice as long to boot, and when windows do finally come up, they skip around the screen when I attempt to drag them around. I often move a window to a particular location and let go of the mouse button, only to see that it jumps to another location a moment later.

There are a few other issues that I'd like to bring up, such as the conversion from PD3 to PD4 messing up my drive map settings, and adding multiple maps to .PFS/Home and Mac, whereas I had neither of these mapped under PD3.
Although honestly, that's the least of my concerns at this point.

Currently, PD4 is absolutely useless. PD3 was lightning fast compared to this new version, and it's very disappointing.

I have already installed the Parallels Tools multiple times, and if there is a specific documented procedure that I should follow to correct this issue, please provide a link.

 

I'd like to mention that things seemed to have improved a bit. All I did was disable "Shared Folders" > "Map folders to drive letters" and changed "Startup and Shutdown" > "Open as:" from "Coherence" to "Window". Then the next time I started the VM, it automatically started to reinstall Parallel Tools (I have no idea why), and then it quickly rebooted when finished. It's been running "okay" since then. Still not at good as under PD3, and only when you're not in Coherence mode. The moment you enter that mode, it slows down to a crawl.

 

Tried shutting down Kaspersky?

Has anybody tried turning off Karspersky Internet Protection (or whatever is called, I am not in Parallels)
I did as soon as upgraded and got things moving. Boot up still takes almost double the time as in V3.

 

I tried all that - still very, very slow. Reinstalling Parallels Tools took about an hour. Using an iMac on 10.5.5, 2ghz processor with 2gb memory, and given 750mb to parallels (originally I'd let it work it out for itself).

Very disappointed indeed with P4 - I was running along pretty much okay and pretty fast with P3, albeit with some mouse issues.

I wonder if Parallels actually tested this before chucking it out, or did they just write it and hope for the best?

 

You can uninstall Parallels Tools from the Windows Control Panel and selecting Add or Remove Programs.

Also you might try repairing Permissions in Disk Utility in Application on the Mac side and deleting the Cache folders in the Library of the System and User Folders. Then Empty the Trash and reboot the Mac. Apple tech support told me to do this with slow running problems and it appears to help me after I install major applications.

My tools originally took about an hour to install, but then I rebooted the MAC and installed them again (very fast) and rebooted the Mac and everything works ok.

Don't know if any of this will help, but it can't hurt.

 

Did you try to set 1 processor instead of 2? It helped on my system...

 

I've tried both, yes - originally was one, which was unbelievably slow, then tried two, which was just annoyingly slow.

 

Slow on all machines

We have 5 macs running Parallels and XP, and we all have some real issues with slow performance. For example, when hitting anything that reuires a folder to pop up from a program or the web, it takes forever to get the window up, and then clicking on folders can also be slow. Has anyone else experienced this and found a solution? I am on an iMac, 4MB ram and Parallels 4.0. Thanks

 

Have you tried toggling off shared folders checkbox in your configuration? See if you get a speed up. You may need shared folders to get work done, but the experiment none the less will help identify if shared folders is part of your slow down.

 

Interesting - that did make a differnce, but as you say, can't work that way. Thanks for the tip, though, at least it is a start.