How fast/slow would you expect it to be?

I installed Parallels yesterday with Windows XP, and am very disappointed with performance; to the point I'm wondering if something could be set incorrectly.

Every time I click ANYTHING in the VM, I hear the hard disc of my (new) IMac go into a frenzy and it can take 30 seconds to a minute for the task to load - and I'm talking about a big application, it can be something as minor as going into My Computer.

Then, when I Ctrl+Alt to come back my Mac, I get the spinning wheel and have to wait another minute for it to sort itself out. I have nothing else running except VM and a browser on the Mac side.

I thought that it would all be much slicker than it is at the moment :-( Was I expecting too much?

Thanks

 

Something is wrong, opening My Computer should be near instantaneous. Have you tried repairing permissions in the Mac? What VM config settings are you using? Presume you have installed Parallels tools? Which Parallels version?

 

How much RAM do you have set for your VM and how much do you have in your Mac? Lots of disk access and the spinning wheel suggest that OS X is starved for memory, and is having to resort to primarily using virtual memory (which will make your Mac VERY slow, as you observed). I would recommend a minimum of 2 GB of memory in your Mac, and always leave at least 1 GB of RAM for OS X (so if you have 2 GB, only give your VMs a total of 1 GB of memory or less). You should then see much better performance in Windows.

 

Thank you for your advice

Is re-allocating RAM a straightforward task? I'll certainly have a look at it.

 

Hmmm I wasn't sure about the Tools so I just ran the menu option to install them. I think there is some improvement - perhaps I was expecting too much as I only have 1GB of RAM.

 

Memory allocation in windows VM

So let me see if I understand this correctly:

Given a choice between letting Mac OS do the swapping, and windows just using Mac VM (large windows memory), or letting the guest windows do internal swapping, to reduce the amount of Mac VM swapping (small windows memory), the better choice is to have both OS's doing swapping?

That seems ... backwards. Oh well, live and learn.