I purchased Parallels during the beta period as it showed a great deal of promise. But under average use (loading up firefox, compressing a file or installing one), it gets slower and slower as I use it, often within a few minutes. I am running it on a MacBook Pro with 2 GB Ram (allocating 1GB to Parallels) running with the lastest beta and tools installed. At this point the software is unusuable, and is actually slower than VirtualPC. It's quite speedy on start up and for the first few minutes, but as soon as I start to really do anything, everything slows to a crawl. I have since installed BootCamp because I can't get any serious work done in Parallels. Which is unfortunate. Any insight or support anyone could offer woudl be greatly appreciated, including Parallels support. Thanks EWM
Try lowering memory allocated to Parallels to 512 and 384 for you VM. What other Apps are you running on the OSX side?
Load the "Activity Monitor" program you will find in MacOSX > applications > utility folder. Then sort by "%CPU". This will show you what programs etc. are hogging the processors. You can take a look at many other aspects of the system. For what it's worth, I continually find that Safari goes nuts and hogs masses of memory. (I'm running the very latest Tiger on a MacBook). Quitting from Safari solves lots of speed issues for me.
If you are using Windows XP you may not need more than 256MB allocated to the virtual machine unless you are running RAM hungry windows apps - or many apps at the same time. I am currently using 200MB on the XP side for software development and testing... visual studio, codewarrior etc. and everything is working great - so much faster than Virtual PC which I used for years on a G4.
One thing I found that caused this for me was having Norton AntiVirus' Auto-protect mode active under MacOSX. It was absolutely thrashing the living daylights out of the HD. Since turning that off it works great.
Also consider looking at your windows (and which version is it that you are using??) usage, via task manager (parallels Send keystroke CTRL-ALT-DEL) Under XP there is a performance tab, showinbg physical memory used, cpu usage graph and pf usage. See if anything is pegged. Also look at the process list, sort by clicking on the cpu column. Running dvdshrink I see it take from 30 to 70 % cpu and 145,768K of memory. XP still snappy and usable for other tasks. Also the process list will ID whats sucking up CPU cycles in your VM. I am running 1862.2 beta, Win XP with SP2 768MB allocated ram, 10GB drive space, I have parallels running 24/7 generally with out issue until XP hacks up a furball.
