How I solved performance problems

Hi everyone,

Like probably half the Parallels world, I upgraded to 4.0 and saw my previously snappy Windows environment slow to a crawl. With some persistence and a little planning, I have a decent 4.0 installation now. It shouldn't be this hard...

I had previously purchased Acronis True Image Home. Since Parallels bundles this with new purchases (although not with upgrades as it turns out), I think including a gotcha with Acronis is worth mentioning. Also I created a logical partition with Acronis Disk Director, which I think is almost essential as you'll see in a moment.

1. Before even thinking about upgrading, create a backup of C: As I mentioned, I use Acronis True Image Home because it does an image backup. You can use any other backup program but it needs to do an image backup. I backed up to a place in the OS X file system.

2. Go through the 4.0 upgrade process. Note: You'll need your original Windows install CD (I did, anyway). I didn't see this as a requirement in the Parallels web site. You don't need your license key, just the disk.

3. After the upgrade, launch Windows. For some reason, it asked me to activate Windows again. Don't activate!

4. Install the Parallels Tools (Virtual Maching/Install Parallels Tools).

5. At this point if you're very lucky, you'll have a successful upgrade and you'll be happy. Or it will be as slow as molasses. If the latter, carry on...

6. Back up your system a second time. Why? The first time was for the usual reason — if something went horribly wrong you have a backup. But if steps 1-4 went OK, then the first backup isn't what you want. The second backup has the Parallels tools installed.

7. Create an Acronis True Image startup disk. Insert a blank CD in the DVD drive. Go through the process of creating a startup disk. There is a place where it asks for a command to use before you start the program. Enter "quiet acpi=off noapic". I could not get Acronis True Image to do a restore before I learned about this. And BTW, theoretically you can do a restore from the Windows version of True Image. All it did for me was hang. You might be luckier than me, so you can try to use the Windows program to restore. If it doesn't work, use this method.

8. Create a new virtual machine. Install the most basic install of Windows.

9. You have to have a place to store the the new backup. But not only do you need a place, you need room on your virtual machines hard drive for both the backup and the drive with the operating system. For me that meant expanding the default 32 GB "hard disk" to 42 GB using Acronis Disk Director. First you expand the virtual machine's hard drive. For the life of me I can't find how you do that. There is some Parallels tool that does it. Sorry, but it's getting late and I'm getting burned out...

10. Create a logical partition (I called mine D.

9. Shut down your new virtual machine (and the old one if it's still running). Change the Parallels boot order let the DVD drive have precidence over the hard drive. Sorry again... I can't remember exactly how to do that.

10. Give a drive letter to your new D drive using the appropriate Windows utility.

11. Copy the backup file to the D drive. If you leave it in the OS X file system, the restore disk (which boots into a rough equivalent of DOS) can't see it.

12. Reboot with the Acronis restore CD in your drive. Use True Image to restore your backup.

13. Reboot again, this time into Windows. Reinstall the Parallels Tools. I wound up having to deal with some new hardware wizards. Just let them discover the hardware.

Now everything should work. My results seem to be faster than the upgraded virtual machine. I'm tempted to just reinstall Windows from scratch and all my applications, but I think that would be much more time consuming because I had a very highly configured Windows to begin with.

I'm sorry I've left out some details. I'm tired of spending the day doing this. I'm not too happy that Parallels couldn't have done a better job converting to the 4.0 format. I've stuck with Parallels — who knows if Fusion is any better? When they do 5.0, I hope it's a lot better than this.