Parallels 12 with Windows 10 is buggy and rather slow

B

Bart_Read

Bit poster
Hi there,

I've been using Parallels 12 with Windows 10 for just over a month now and in that time have become quite frustrated with the bugginess I've noticed:

(1) The biggest, and by far the most common, annoyance is that when the Windows VM is running in another space, keyboard strokes often do not make it through to the OSX desktop, and therefore any apps running in OSX. The workaround for this is to switch back to the Windows space and then back to an OSX space. It happens several times a day, every single day, and it's extremely aggravating.

(2) Support for multiple monitors. I regularly connect my Macbook Pro to one or, more usually, two other monitors. Despite having "Use All Displays In Full Screen" checked quite regularly the VM will only appear on one of two, or two of three monitors. Again, there's a workaround: uncheck the "Use All Displays In Full Screen" option, exit full screen, re-enter full screen, recheck the option but, again, it gets pretty tiresome. Today an even more bizarre thing happened when Parallels created four screens across three monitors, with two appearing in spaces on my laptop's built-in display. The workaround was the same.

(3) Installing updates. All too often the "Install Updates and Restart" option from Windows results in the VM hanging at the "Restarting" stage forever. The only workaround is to manually, and forcibly, stop and restart it.

In addition, performance for software development SUCKS. I'm running Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 and, even with Resharper disabled, building the large solution I'm working on takes two minutes, whereas for my colleagues - running HP i5 droneware laptops - it takes 15-30 seconds. This *really* isn't anywhere close to acceptable.

My machine is a late 2015 15 inch Macbook Pro Retina, quad core i7 processors, 16 gigs RAM, 1TB SSD, running OSX Yosemite. I haven't applied any resource limits to Parallels VMs, and I'm running Parallels 12.0.2.

I've followed your instructions for tuning my VM for performance but it doesn't seem to have made any difference, so I'd appreciate any suggestions you have to offer, along with an indication of whether you plan to release any patches to improve performance?


Many thanks,


Bart Read
 
Another thing: with multiple monitors sometimes trackpad/mouse events don't get through to the second desktop so you can't click buttons, etc. I haven't found a viable workaround for this other than to shut down and restart the VM.

This tends to happen after waking up the VM from sleep and then connecting a second monitor.


Thanks,


Bart Read
 
Hi there,

Thanks for the suggestion - I will do this as soon as I have some time free.

I ran into another problem this morning when I brought my Macbook out of screensaver: Parallels went completely nuts, stopped recognising my third monitor (connected via HDMI) and kept switching spaces between OSX desktop and Windows desktop on my second monitor (connected via Thunderbolt). Eventually it calmed down but in the meantime crashed Visual Studio 2015 and the VM hung when I tried to shut it down.

Seriously, can you reassure me that you plan to release a patch upgrade sometime soon that addresses some of the stability issues? I've never had these kinds of problems with any other version of Parallels and it really is quite irritating how poor version 12 is in comparison with previous versions.

Many thanks,

Bart Read
 
I have also been experiencing speed issues since upgrading. It got so bad that I had to do a remote support session. This definitely improved things but it is still not moving along as quickly as I would like. I have now upgraded Parallels several times in the last couple of years using the same Windows 7 virtual machine so I was thinking of doing a clean install. I would be interested in your experience with the process suggested above as I might try that as an interim step.
 
simonmason said:
I have also been experiencing speed issues since upgrading. It got so bad that I had to do a remote support session. This definitely improved things but it is still not moving along as quickly as I would like. I have now upgraded Parallels several times in the last couple of years using the same Windows 7 virtual machine so I was thinking of doing a clean install. I would be interested in your experience with the process suggested above as I might try that as an interim step.
Click to expand...
As a probable solution you can also try this KB
 
I did try this. I get the same performance in both virtual machines. I am seeing CPU usage within the Windows virtual machine hitting 100% on very simple actions, and the CPU usage in the Mac is going well over 100% on a regular basis. When I type text in the virtual machine it is sluggish. As I mentioned before I did have a remote support session and they tweaked some of the settings and improved it - it was virtually unresponsive before. However, per my previous question - I have upgraded several times with the same virtual machine. Should I consider creating a new virtual machine and a clean copy of windows?
 
Maria@Parallels said:
As a probable solution you can also try this KB
Click to expand...
This is a very, very bad answer. I just paid $50 dollars to upgrade and now I will spend even more time $$$$$ to fix a PARALLEL's upgrade screwup!!!!
Plus I have no idea how to reinstall my Windows 10 because it was part of that free upgrade process!!!! COME ON !!!
The answer SHOULD NOT BE make the customer SPEND MORE OF HIS OWN TIME AND MONEY BECAUSE YOUR UPGRADE PROCESS IS BAD!!!!
 
I'm having the same problems, Parallels 12 with Windows 10 is buggy and very slow. The Windows 10 performance is terrible, and now and then the Windows 10 VM gets corrupted (and I had to delete the VM, and restore the files from backup).
Here is a workaround that might help:
Parallels support says: For Parallels Desktop versions 11 and 12 it is recommended to use Macs with 8GB of RAM or more. Only Parallels Desktop 10 and the previous versions are recommended with 4GB of RAM. My MacBook Air has only 4GB RAM. So I uninstalled Parallels Desktop 12, and installed Parallels Desktop 10. After this the performance running a Windows10 virtual machine is much better (with 2048MB RAM allocated for the VM). Parallels says in the ads that Parallels Desktop 12 has better support for Windows10 and works better with less RAM, but this is obviously not true.
Here are some links:
- Parallels uninstaller: http://kb.parallels.com/Attachments/kcs-35959/PDremove.zip
- Download-link for the latest build of Parallels Desktop 10: http://www.parallels.com/directdownload/pd10
- Links about installing and activating Parallels Desktop 10: http://kb.parallels.com/122647 and http://kb.parallels.com/122649
The same virtual machine files can be used in Parallels Desktop 12 and 10. Remember to shutdown the VMs before reinstalling Parallels. Uninstalling Parallels Tools inside the VM before reinstalling Parallels might be a good idea.
 
I deleted my virtual machine and created a new one. I am using Windows 7 Pro. It runs much faster now, although still slow to load or shutdown. However, if I closed the lid on my macbook air with the machine running it takes forever to wake up, and doesn't perform well at all after that. Launching simple apps seems to pin the CPUs constantly, etc. I believe I will try stepping back to a previous version.
 
I stepped back to version 10 on my MacBook Air with 4GB RAM. I can confirm that it works quite well. Also, unexpectedly it loaded my virtual machine from version 12 with no problems. Thanks for posting this.
 
Since reverting back to Windows 7 I have noticed that it is now running much more quickly and appears to be much more stable. It does occasionally have trouble coming out of sleep mode when I close the lid on my macbook. But this is something I have noticed in the past. One side effect is that I can no longer see the windows c drive in finder - apparently this is due to running Sierra. But I can see the Mac drives in Windows so this is fine for now. I did get a warning message letting me know that I would not be able to mount the windows drive in Sierra and asking me to upgrade to the latest version of parallels.
 
Team Parallels, have you tried PD12 with Windows 10?

Would be great with some input why there is such a huge performance difference betw. Win 7 -> Win 10 [slow/unusable]
as well as PD11 -> PD12 [estimate to 30-40% slower than PD11]
 
DavidE7 said:
Team Parallels, have you tried PD12 with Windows 10?

Would be great with some input why there is such a huge performance difference betw. Win 7 -> Win 10 [slow/unusable]
as well as PD11 -> PD12 [estimate to 30-40% slower than PD11]
Click to expand...
Hi @DavidE7, are you running Windows 10 Creators update 64 bit? If so, please try a 32-bit edition to check the performance.
 
Hi @PaulChris@Parallels
I was running 64 bit already and I prefer that since our applications need it. Can you clarify why 32 bit would solve the issue?
Please note that the speed on V11 was ok, with V12 the performance issues came...

How about version 13? Feels more like a feature-bloat update than focust on stability and performance!?
 
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