I'm using a Mac Pro 2,66Ghz with a Radeon X1900 512MB Graphics Card and 2 Apple Studio Displays 20". OS: Mac OS X 10.4.10 and Windows XP SP2
I recently found out that Parallels is to blame for my continuous crashes and screen distortions.
From the moment that I start the guest OS in Parallels the upper Apple Menu bar gets distorted. This means that all text commands are gone and I see garbage pixels.
This will go away once I change to a different application.
The computer crashes a lot when some fancy Quartz effects are showing. It happens a lot when I minimize a window and you see the shrinking animation. It also happens when I activate Expose, showing all the windows in miniature form. I already changed the minimize effect to 'Scale Effect' instead of 'Genie effect'. That ended the crashes when minimizing. But the other crashes still occur.
When the crash occurs it happens in the middle of the animation. The screen will get frozen and remains in this state. It's not possible to move the cursor or use the keyboard. However all the applications that were running in the background continue to run. For example iTunes will continue playing music.
I can ssh to the crashed computer and see all the active processes using the top command. When the computer is in a crashed state Parallels will use 100% of the processors. It's not possible to kill the Parallels process or restart the finder. I have to restart the Mac by hand.
When the computer doesn't crash I get a lot of screen distortions in the form of horizontal lines or fixed coloured pixels. These distortions occur in all applications. They don't happen when Parallels is not running.
I hoped that by updating the X1900 graphics card with the latest firmware, that was released last week, the problems would go away. But they didn't.
I already tried reinstalling Mac OS X and Parallels. That didn't help.
Does anyone have a solution?
David
I recently found out that Parallels is to blame for my continuous crashes and screen distortions.
From the moment that I start the guest OS in Parallels the upper Apple Menu bar gets distorted. This means that all text commands are gone and I see garbage pixels.
This will go away once I change to a different application.
The computer crashes a lot when some fancy Quartz effects are showing. It happens a lot when I minimize a window and you see the shrinking animation. It also happens when I activate Expose, showing all the windows in miniature form. I already changed the minimize effect to 'Scale Effect' instead of 'Genie effect'. That ended the crashes when minimizing. But the other crashes still occur.
When the crash occurs it happens in the middle of the animation. The screen will get frozen and remains in this state. It's not possible to move the cursor or use the keyboard. However all the applications that were running in the background continue to run. For example iTunes will continue playing music.
I can ssh to the crashed computer and see all the active processes using the top command. When the computer is in a crashed state Parallels will use 100% of the processors. It's not possible to kill the Parallels process or restart the finder. I have to restart the Mac by hand.
When the computer doesn't crash I get a lot of screen distortions in the form of horizontal lines or fixed coloured pixels. These distortions occur in all applications. They don't happen when Parallels is not running.
I hoped that by updating the X1900 graphics card with the latest firmware, that was released last week, the problems would go away. But they didn't.
I already tried reinstalling Mac OS X and Parallels. That didn't help.
Does anyone have a solution?
David