Hi all, Picked up a 13" MacBook Pro (2.4GHz, 250GB, 320M) and purchased Parallels Desktop 6 in order to do some light gaming without having to boot into my Windows 7 x64 partition (the Parallels VM is configured to use the Boot Camp partition). I get major audio crackling and popping when using the VM (audio in the Boot Camp partition itself is A-OK). Has anyone else experienced the same issue? I have the VM configured to use 2 cores and 2GB of RAM. Thanks!
You didn't say how much RAM your MacBook Pro has. If it has 4 GB or less then you could try lowering the virtual machine RAM. You could also try comparing the performance of your Boot Camp virtual machine to a virtual machine imported from the Boot Camp virtual machine (I don't think using a virtual hard disk instead of a Boot Camp partition would affect sound play back performance but it would be an interesting test).
Sorry about that, my unit has 4GB DDR3. As far as I know, when Parallels or Fusion use the Boot Camp partition as a VM, it uses the physical partition, not a virtual disk. I guess I can create a virtual disk VM with a fresh install of Win 7 and test that out...
They use the Boot Camp partition as a VM. What I'm saying is that you can use the Import Boot Camp option to have a second VM that doesn't use the Boot Camp partition but has all the same data as the Boot Camp partition at the time of the import. That way, you don't need to reinstall everything and you get all the benefits of using a virtual hard disk instead of a Boot Camp partition. Read the "Using Boot Camp Partition in Virtual Machine" section of the Parallels Desktop Help for more info.
