Help badly needed: Outlook add-in doesn't function under Parallels

Hi,

First, an apology - I'm definitely not as well-versed in the inner-working of this stuff as most of the posters here so I'm sorry if I sound a tad moronic.

i own a new MacBook Core 2 Duo, 2.33 GHz, 2 Gigs of Ram. I've installed Parallels without any major problems and am using RC 3120.

The problem: My business receives hundreds of emails per day and over the past few years I've come to rely heavily on "Nelson Email Organizer" which is an Outlook add-in (I'm using Outlook 2007) and, well, an email organizer (www.emailorganizer.com if seeing the product would be helpful). It's essentially my most important program and although I love my MacBook, I literally woudn't have purchased it if I knew I was going to have a problem with "NEO."

The problem: under Parallels, each action in NEO (i.e. making a message "inactive") which should take only a second or a milli-second takes around 10 seconds which may not sound like much but, multiplied over many emails, essentially makes the product unusable.

I contacted the product's tech support and they didn't know the answer but seemed to think that if I could "set affinity" for the relevant process it would help. Unfortunately, I don't have that option for processes in my Windows Task Manager (don't know if it's because I'm using XP Home Edition).

I was further advised "The direction I’d point is to find out if you can assign applications with one of the processors in much the same way the affinity mask does it". But does that make sense? From what I've read on here Parallels only uses one processor anyhow.

in any event, any help you could provide would be appreciate. I've personalzed NEO to the extent that it's going to be a huge undertaking to move everything and, in any event, I don't think there is a Mac program offering Neo-like features. As a side note (to the exent this isn't inappropriate), I'd be happy to pay someone with more knowledge than me (i.e. virtutally anyone) to download NEO, use it with Outlook 2007 and troubleshoot the problem for me. Please PM me if interested.

Thanks,

Jeff

 

Open the Windows performance monitor (Task manager) and see if you can tell if it is disk, memory, or CPU that is being taxed.

 

It's the CPU % that goes up over 100%.

Also, on Mac's usage monitor, Parallels shows over 100% CPU when Outlook is downloading mail and NEO is open. in fact, the system essentially locks up when this occurs.

I would also add that, weirdly enough, occasionally an "action" wont trigger the high CPU use and will work as it's supposed to (ie. instantly). I can't figure out the pattern as to when that happens or when it doesn't but, for the majority of the time, it doesn't act appropriately and does use 100%+ CPU.

 

What about memory? And how much memory did you allocate to Windows.

 

1008 MB although I've tried a few different settings.

 

The Windows task manager perf monitor will also tell how your memory is being used. Memory available is useful to know at this point. If there is not much free memory, like 10's of megs, then you have a memory problem. My guess though is disk IO and CPU usage. The Neo tool is basically a database and it is processing unstructured data and putting it into structures and hopefully some indexed tables. This is a lot of work for a single CPU, and also disk IO intensive. I'd be tempted to try the VMWare Fusion product at this point as it provides two cpu's to Windows (Parallels will too, soon, I'm told), or Boot Camp from Apple. The reason for suggesting this is to see if you are CPU bound. If it runs faster in Fusion, which is running debug code, then there's probably not a lot that can be done in Parallels untll two procs are supported. Boot Camp of course provides all resources to the booted OS be it Windows or OS X. A second disk drive wouldn't hurt, either, as it will provide two spindles for all that disk IO that is going on.

There are two places for setting memory: One is in the Parallels preferences and it can be auto or a specific size. The other place is when you define a VM. The Parallels preference value should be left at auto, or 15% larger than the VM memory. There are also some cache tuning options you can experiment with to see if things improve.

 

Thanks for the detailed response. I had heard about Parallels 3.0 offering 2 CPUs but don't know when that is supposed to be released (?). My understanding is that if I used Bootcamp I'd have to reboot every time I want to check email which is impractical. Perhaps I should consider VMWare. I do have the memory set to "auto.' Where can I adust the cache?

Thanks again.