My computer has been behaving erratically since installing Parallels Desktop

Ever since I installed PD 3.0 a couple of days ago, my computer has been behaving in a way, that PD 2.5 did not behave under OS X Tiger. I have many issues that need to be resolved.

My computer is a 24" iMac with 3 GB of RAM, running OS X 10.5.1

Some of the issues are:

1. Every time I start Windows XP Home inside PD, I get a strange error message. Next to an octagonal red shield (like a stop sign) with an exclamation mark, it says the following: "[C] Microsoft Windows XP Timed out waiting for the system to initialize. The volume has been ejected. You can use the init_timeout mount option to wait longer." I have no clue what this means, and what the effect may be on the performance of my computer.

2. When I try to close XP by clicking the red square button in the top right hand corner of the PD window, the VM crashes and won't close, I only see the spinning beach ball. Only Force Quit will close the VM. The same thing happens when I try to close XP via the "start" button.

3. Sometimes, I cannot close PD itself. I see the spinning beach ball, and only a Force Quit will help.

4. I have inexplicable freezes in many programs. Adobe Acrobat freezes, Printer program freezes, Preview freezes. On top of that I cannot Force Quit these programs when this happens, nor can I restart my computer by going to restart in the menu bar. I can only restart the computer by turning off the power and then turning the computer back on.

5. Ever since I installed PD, my external back up hard drive is spinning like a lunatic. I just never stops. It even spins when there have been absolutely no changes to any files. I use Time Machine, and before PD it would do it's job and spin once an hour for a minute or so. Now the drive spins about 20 minutes each time.

6. When another user is logged in on the Mac OS, and I try to switch back to my user account, I cannot do it. I also cannot logout the other user, via the menu bar. The computer freezes. I can also not restart. The only way out of this, is cutting the power and turning the computer back on.

There are other issues, but these are the only issues I can think of right now.

So far I have not even installed any Windows applications yet. Given how PD has been wreaking havoc with my computer I am afraid to so so. The way it is now, PD is not at all useful to me, because I constantly have to restart my computer after multiple crashes. Fortunately I still have a Windows box, I can run my applications on.

Does anyone know, if these are known issues, that are being worked on, and when a resolution of these issues can be expected. Does anyone know of any fixes.

Thanks in advance.

Abrasha

 

Hello,

please, check your e-mail, your request ticket was answered.
Thank you.

Best regards,
Alicia.

 

Hopefully your question was answered by the request ticket mentioned above. I don't know what Build you were using, but these are known issues with 5160. I had them, as well. The culprit for me in all the problems with the Mac OS and programs, was Spaces. It did not seem to play nicely with Parallels. I disabled Spaces and everything worked very well from then on. Now, recently Build 5582 has been released which, for me, solved all of these issues. I have re-enabled Spaces and both Parallels and all my Mac programs now behave nicely. You might want to try this new build. Hope it works as well for you!

 

Hello, kmacard,

you are right - 5582 fixes all these issues except for the 5th point which I believe is caused by Time Machine backing up Parallels. This can be helped by excluding Parallels from Time Machine.

Best regards,
Alicia.

 

Hi Alicia,

Thank you for your quick response and email.

I have downloaded Build 5582. Should I now uninstall Build 5160 first and then install the new build, or should I just install the new build over the old one?

 

You can choose.

I always uninstall first......

 

Hello,

abrasha, clean re-install is recommended, so, you better uninstall 5160 and then install 5582.

Best regards,
Alicia.