Hibernate/Pause/Suspend/Power Off huh?

D

David N

Bit poster
I'm a veteran Mac User, having to use XP on a MacBook for work.

There seems many options for the same thing here, in the subject line, can someone clarify this in simple terms please?

That is, what is the relationship/difference/analogy/pros-cons among these choices for temporarily exiting Windows:
-Hibernate in XP
-Suspend VM in Parallels
-Power Off VM in Parallels
-Sleep in Mac OS

I'd be interested to know which options have what effect on the Mac OS memory use.

Thanks!
dn
 
Here's the (very) quick rundown:

Hibernate in XP: Tells XP to write the contents of memory to the hard drive, and turn off teh machine. Emulated power states in parallels, of course, but XP knows that a power transition is happening, and it stores it's state to disk.

Suspend VM in Parallels: Parallels "simply" stops executing Windows, until it's resumed. Windows is not aware of any power state transitions... the clock, for instance, can get out of sync (Parallels Tools helps fix this.)

Power Off VM is like hitting the power switch on the front of an XP box. Windows is aware of the power transition, but not really in a healty way.

Sleep in Mac OS puts the entire physical machine into a suspend state... all programs (incuding parallels) stop running... OS X is aware of the power state change, but the Windows XP instance is essentially suspended, so XP is not aware of any power change.

As far as memory use... the Sleep in Mac OS will keep the VM in memory; the rest should all cause the VM's memory to be released (since they all stop the VM).
 
Thanks n final clarification

Thanks very much, that does indeed help.

Are any of the methods safer than the other for temporarily leaving XP?

That is, if I want to sleep the MacBook without exiting XP, should I first hibernate it then sleep the Mac? Your comments make me think just sleeping the Mac with XP running is asking for troubles.

Thanks!!
 
Although I typically have no problems just suspending the Mac without explicitly pausing/suspending the XP VM, I have gotten in the habit of always Suspending the VM before sleeping the Mac. During early Betas of Parallels, there were some significant issues with stability after a Mac suspend without explicitly suspending the VM, so it's largely habit. (Note that I'm talking about suspending the VM from Parallels menu, not the Suspend/Hibernate from with XP...)

That said, I often have Parallels running in the background and suspend the Mac without suspending Parallels, and can't in recent memory (since the production release...) remember it causing a problem.

I've never had a problem with just suspending the VM without hibernating XP. Windows just doesn't seem to care. It's more the Parallels/OSX side that seems to (or used to) care.
 
I'm finding that when I hiberate XP, when I power it up again it doesn't manage to recover it's networking. I can switch off the network, switch it back on and it never seems to recover. It just sits there trying to get an IP address, fails and gives up. I wouldn't normally bother except that I'm testing some code in Windows which hibernates!

Generally I just sleep my MacBook and leave Windows to cope with it - so far it has done without a hiccup.
 
Hibernate breaks Parallel's tools

When I choose to Hibernate my XP in Parallels, everything goes as planned, but when it comes back up, The Parallels Tools no longer work, as well as networking. I have to restart Windows to get everyting functioning again. I enabled Hibernation because that's what I used on my PC/WinXP to give me a quick way to pick-up where I left off.

Parallels has Suspend, under the VM menu, that seems to be simillar to Hibernate, but actually works (i.e. doesn't break the Tools, or networking.) Thanks Parallels.

iD
 
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