My PD 4 experience after 10 days

I have checked your posts. After you have reinstalled tools the situation may changed. Please be patient.

 

My Experience After 2 Days

4.0 is Atrocious!

I have just uninstalled Kaspersky since it causes me to lose network connectivity. Also, I have found 4.0 to be a step backwards from 3.X. I have been struggling with 4.0 upgrade for 2 days.

1)I used to be able to resize the VM window and have the resolution adjusted, but now I have to do this in Windows control panels.

2) Coherence is not functioning in my install. I have to use the windowed mode.

3) The upgrade process was very long and not documented well, at all.

4) The bug tracking is atrocious. I can see a ticket, but I cannot edit it. If I go to add a new issue, it asks for some silly template and none of them are for Parallels desktop.

5) There is a priority on the ticket, and it says that I set it, but that is not the case. It is auto-entered and I cannot change it.

If I do not get this fixed, I am moving all our company VM software to Fusion. I loved Parallels 3 and used it almost every day. 4.0 is just plain bad.

Bill W

 

Could you please tell me the ticket number(s)?

 

Not only is it slow. Sometimes my apps just hang. For example, I am trying to open an Excel file from Outlook. Excel launched and nothings happening. No CPU load on iStats, nothing. Never had this happen in 3.0.

 

USB printer won't print... any more

Tim...

Maybe this is a way to get fast support...

Our situation is we have been Parallels users 2.x, 3.x .... Since converting to version 4 we can no longer print to a local USB dot matrix printer.

We have downloaded and reinstalled Bonjour Wizard several times
We have reinstalled Bonjour printer .... version generic/PCL and generic/post script several times

Bonjour printer creates a new printer visible in Windows/Control/Printer. But that printer can not be selected as a printer to use or selected to view preference or privilege ..... each attempt will result in error message about not having sufficient privileges.

Help!!!!!!!!!

Thanks

Jim

 

Has anyone had their VM disapear when upgrading to 4.0? Now 4.0 wants me to start over. I have Time Machine...anyone know if I can restore 3.0 with it?

 

I'm struggling too

I've upgraded both my wife's and my macbook pro's to v4.0.3540 and it couldn't get any slower. I've followed this thread and it's suggestions with no luck. It actually takes 10 minutes for winxp to boot and become usable, and then it is horribly slow...I mean really really slow. Version 3 seemed a bit sluggish at times, but it ran circles around this (and an older windows laptop I have). I've tried everything I can to adjust memory, priorities, disabling things, but nothing helps.

I really want to make this work to avoid restoring v3; and I am a software developer myself. I'm willing to beta test or whatever to help! For what it is worth, it appears to me that there is a bottle-neck with disk access as well as maybe initial network connections too. For the last 18 minutes I've been watching software install in a guest winxp system that normally takes 20 seconds...and that includes when running on v3. Between my wife and I we have 5 guest winxp systems that all exhibit the same issues on V4.

I'm going to try re-compressing the drive to see if that helps any. The system is completely unusable now and I really need to find a solution fast... and hopefully it will not be restoring v3 and getting a refund.

Chuck

P.S. That software install is still running... 25 minutes and counting...

Modified: install took 28 minutes total and I also wanted to say that I own vmware as well but rarely use it because Parallels has a nicer feel to it. Could there be a host driver conflict due to having vmware installed too? Just curious...

Modification 2: To clarify, by beta test I meant any builds you want run that have more debug logging or whatever that the developers could use to help find the problem.

 

Hi,

To whom who experienced low performance issue after Windows guest starts with Parallels Internet Security (by Kaspersky) installed. Could you check if it running? Just double click on Kaspersy icon in the System Tray to open its window. This window should show the current status. While Kaspersky scans the files and update the database it takes much resources. Just wait while it complete its operations.

Best regards,
Alexander

 

what if we do not have this soft and still experience huge cpu load caused by prl_vm_app? It s been more than a week this issue was reported and still no help despite tickets, numerous posts, etc...

 

Hi,

I'm sorry for giving you troubles. Unfortunately we can't reproduce the problem in our lab. We gathering all the information about such issue and trying to solve it, but without any success yet. I hope we will catch the bug. It seems happens on converted VMs only.

Best regards,
Alexander

 

thanks for this very first honest answer ! We can clearly understand that you get troubles but are glad to see that you are working on it. Just a question though : you cannot reproduce the trouble in your lab or cannot find its cause ? Let us know whether you need anything from us (logs, reports, screenshots, etc)

 

We can't reproduce it and as a result we can't investigate where the bug lives. Could you please login in Windows guest, wait awhile (approximately 3 min), click Help menu of the Parallels Application and select Report a Problem menu item, then check all the checkboxes and then click Send button. Write down the report number and send it to this forum. Thank you.

 

I did that some time ago : ticket 15253. However, I am glad to announce that I fixed my problem. As you mentioned that only converted VM would be affected, I reinstalled a fresh VM with XP within PD4 and copied my data to the new machine. There is no issue any longer, PD4 performing nicely and better than PD3 !!!!!!! I know it is a bothering fix but I have to say that it worth it. PD4 is really faster than PD3 especially after removing all the prl_* file from system32 (for some reasons, those PD3 files were installed even with an install from within PD4) and reinstalling the tools. Issue solved for me.

 

I see the report. Thank you.

 

Converted VM's

Is there an easier way to 'migrate' an older vm to a clean new v4 vm without having to install windows from scratch? I did find that vm's with a smaller virtual disk size or perhaps the fact that they had almost nothing installed on them run much faster. Could the amount of files on the vm disk be the problem?

Still researching ways to solve the problem and will try a clean install next. Compressing the vm took a long time but didn't appear to help performance at all.

Chuck

 

how to install

hey guys , sorry to ask but how to install the 4.0 version, i read the manual and Iam a bit blur it doesnt say anything about deleting verison 3 but when i click the installation ot does say that the 3.0 version will be removed so how ?

if i try to check for updates in the version 3 the system hangs always did never was able to upgrade to any newer version -

and where is the damn files anyway in cae i want to back up all my windows stuff where do i find that file ?

thanks for your time

Cisco

 

Yes, you should have .hdd file in the old VM folder. Create a new VM in Parallels Desktop 4.0 using custom installation method, when asked about hard disk option choose use an existing one, specify the path to it and on the last window under More options uncheck Start Windows installation. Low performance might be caused by a bunch of reasons. If it's related to hard disk size in you case, then check if there is enough free space on Windows side.

If you install the version 4.0 then previous one will be removed during the install. But it will only affect the application itself, none of your virtual machines will be deleted. Anyway, by default in Parallels Desktop 3.0 virtual machines hard disks are located under /Documents/Parallels/<VM name>, you can simply copy it to some safe place

 

Hello,

in Parallels Desktop 3, all files associated with virtual machines are stored in Documents -> Parallels, there you should find the folders with the virtual machine names.
Although installing Parallels Desktop 4 does remove Parallels Desktop 3, this process does not affect any virtual machines you may have, so there is no need to back them up at this point. It is recommended to back up virtual machines when converting them after Parallels Desktop 4 installation, though.

 

Hello there,

once again I got this problem this evening.
Everything was sluggish and prl_vm_app was taking about 10% of the cpu all the time, even if nothing happens under WinXP.

This is report # 16999

 

When all else fails reread the manual a few times......

We found a solution for printing to a local USB printer. There is an option of either connecting to the "computer" or to "Windows XP". For some reason I assumed that to the computer include both operating system on the computer... reasoning that otherwise makes little sense because both operating system are resident on the computer and selecting Windows XP would mean to the exclusion of OSX. Since I could not get Windows to print choosing the "computer" option I choose the "Windows XP" option just to see. Windows printed and I didn't have time to see if OSX has been excluded.

Since the Windows option worked, I am puzzled what the option is intended to do. After all the purpose of Parallels is to provide a scheme to run a full function guest operating system, including printing. How that "computer" option is intended to work is a mystery.

Jim