PrinceZordar
Member
I installed the demo version of Parallels Desktop for Mac a day or two ago. Since I already had a 20G partition set up for Windows XP via Boot Camp, I set up a VM for that and let Parallels do its installation. I originally gave 512M for Windows XP.
The first couple times I tried to run XP, I crashed it by trying to run Coherence. I stumbled across these forums by accident when searching for the problem on Google (as far as I can tell, there are no links to this forum on the Parallels Support page) and saw the thread about ZoneAlarm causing problems with Coherence. Okay, scratch one feature.
While slow, the XP VM did work at first. (I have used Windows for many years, and am aware that Windows is a memory hog.) However, something would always manage to crash the VM. Running simple things like Internet Explorer would crash the VM, sometimes with an error message from Parallels (Fatal error) and sometimes from Mac OS X (Parallels has closed, but OS X was not affected.) Yesterday I was running Remote Web Workplace through IE7, which seemed to run fine until I logged out. The VM froze and I got "Parallels has closed unexpectedly" or words to that effect.
Typically when the VM closes improperly, attempting to rerun Parallels would give me an error "Cannot find image Boot Camp!" In the few days since the initial install, I don't think it has shut down normally - it has ALWAYS crashed. When it does, I have to go into Disk Utility and manually remount the Windows partition, but even after doing this the "Cannot find image Boot Camp" message would still come up. Trying 2 or 3 more times would eventually bring it back up.
The main reason I even tried Parallels is because I still need to run QuickBooks Pro under Windows and I got tired of having to reboot. Given the awful performance of Parallels so far, I'm scared to run QuickBooks in it, for fear of the VM crashing and eating my data file.
Today I increased the amount of RAM for XP up to 1G. The VM window started, but the entire startup screen was not there - only the lower left corner was visible in the VM window. I had set the Windows video resolution to 1280x1024 at some point, but since the VM crashes almost every time, I thought perhaps the display settings got corrupted. Once Windows loaded, I clicked the "Full Screen" button hoping that would reset the video. The VM window went away, but never came back up in full screen. Instead, the menu bar on the top of my Mac desktop went away, then so did my mounted drives and shortcuts. I waited 5 minutes. Nothing changed, so I selected the Parallels desktop from the task bar and tried to Open it. At this point, everything went into slow motion. A second Parallels icon opened, but it was not selectable. It would take 5-10 seconds for anything to respond to a mouse click. I had a few applications visible, and they worked okay, but every time I tried to Close Parallels it would either do nothing or give me a partial window about "the VM is running, shut down properly, blah blah." The bottom of this window was chopped off through the center of the line that said "Do not show this again", so the buttons were not selectable. (ESC got rid of it.)
After about 10 more minutes of this, I hit the power button. When OS X rebooted, my startup programs did not automatically run. I had to reselect Open at Login for several apps. Everything else seems okay, but I am really afraid to run Parallels again.
I see references to beta versions of Parallels Desktop. I downloaded version 3188; is there is a later version that solves these problems? At this point I am still running a demo version, as there has been no incentive at all for me to pay $80 for a product that does not do what it claims. Am I SOL?
The first couple times I tried to run XP, I crashed it by trying to run Coherence. I stumbled across these forums by accident when searching for the problem on Google (as far as I can tell, there are no links to this forum on the Parallels Support page) and saw the thread about ZoneAlarm causing problems with Coherence. Okay, scratch one feature.
While slow, the XP VM did work at first. (I have used Windows for many years, and am aware that Windows is a memory hog.) However, something would always manage to crash the VM. Running simple things like Internet Explorer would crash the VM, sometimes with an error message from Parallels (Fatal error) and sometimes from Mac OS X (Parallels has closed, but OS X was not affected.) Yesterday I was running Remote Web Workplace through IE7, which seemed to run fine until I logged out. The VM froze and I got "Parallels has closed unexpectedly" or words to that effect.
Typically when the VM closes improperly, attempting to rerun Parallels would give me an error "Cannot find image Boot Camp!" In the few days since the initial install, I don't think it has shut down normally - it has ALWAYS crashed. When it does, I have to go into Disk Utility and manually remount the Windows partition, but even after doing this the "Cannot find image Boot Camp" message would still come up. Trying 2 or 3 more times would eventually bring it back up.
The main reason I even tried Parallels is because I still need to run QuickBooks Pro under Windows and I got tired of having to reboot. Given the awful performance of Parallels so far, I'm scared to run QuickBooks in it, for fear of the VM crashing and eating my data file.
Today I increased the amount of RAM for XP up to 1G. The VM window started, but the entire startup screen was not there - only the lower left corner was visible in the VM window. I had set the Windows video resolution to 1280x1024 at some point, but since the VM crashes almost every time, I thought perhaps the display settings got corrupted. Once Windows loaded, I clicked the "Full Screen" button hoping that would reset the video. The VM window went away, but never came back up in full screen. Instead, the menu bar on the top of my Mac desktop went away, then so did my mounted drives and shortcuts. I waited 5 minutes. Nothing changed, so I selected the Parallels desktop from the task bar and tried to Open it. At this point, everything went into slow motion. A second Parallels icon opened, but it was not selectable. It would take 5-10 seconds for anything to respond to a mouse click. I had a few applications visible, and they worked okay, but every time I tried to Close Parallels it would either do nothing or give me a partial window about "the VM is running, shut down properly, blah blah." The bottom of this window was chopped off through the center of the line that said "Do not show this again", so the buttons were not selectable. (ESC got rid of it.)
After about 10 more minutes of this, I hit the power button. When OS X rebooted, my startup programs did not automatically run. I had to reselect Open at Login for several apps. Everything else seems okay, but I am really afraid to run Parallels again.
I see references to beta versions of Parallels Desktop. I downloaded version 3188; is there is a later version that solves these problems? At this point I am still running a demo version, as there has been no incentive at all for me to pay $80 for a product that does not do what it claims. Am I SOL?
