My experience with Parallels support on this issue
Back to the problem - the common "performance" troubleshooting (to make your Windows run faster) can be found at
http://kb.parallels.com/112091
I have done all of the suggestions listed at that link, none fixes the issue. Here is my experience:
About 9 months ago (June 2012) I upgraded my MacBook Pro to Lion, and I also upgraded to Parallels 7 because it was "recommended" for Lion. Since then, running parallels (with or without a VM running) made my system slow to a crawl. Once my CPU was pegged at 100%, it would heat up, the fans would go into overdrive, and I would be concerned the heat would damage my Mac. Unusable, as many have reported here. I called Parallels support. Spent the next three evenings with Parallels support remoting into my Mac, trying to resolve the issue. They had no clue. They could see the problem happening, and tried all manner of things (I am not sure what all they tried, as this went on for hours on end). I know that we uninstalled Parallels, and reinstalled. I bought a memory upgrade (from 4GB to 8GB) at their suggestion. I even reinstalled OSX, then did a fresh reinstall of Parallels. No change. After that, I gave up. Because I stopped calling Parallels support every evening, I got an email from them saying "We haven't heard from you, so we assume everything is great!" and they closed the ticket.
Because I need both Mac and Windows for work, I dug out my old Windows laptop, and have been lugging around two laptops for the last 9 months. (I spend most of my time at clients' locations, so I need to have both laptops with me all the time.) A royal pain, and the reason I have been using parallels since version 2 or 3.
This past weekend, I decided to bite the bullet (again), and see if i could get P7 working again. There have been a couple of upgrades in the last few months, I figured they must have fixed this issue by now. I installed the latest version of P7, and had the exact same problem. I have a lot of software on my Mac, so, to make things as clean as possible, I spent the weekend backing up everything, formatting my Mac's hard drive, doing a fresh install of Lion. Installed only MS Office 2011 on the Mac, no other software. Mac was running like a champ, very fast and responsive, as I would expect. Still had a lot of software to reinstall, but first I thought I would get Parallels installed.
I downloaded the latest version of P7, installed it, copied my WinXP VM from my backup. Ran it, and Wham! My Mac slows to a crawl. Same symptoms as before. Hours and hours of time with reboots, reinstalls, optimizing, no improvement.
I created a new VM, and tried to do a fresh install of Windows 7 Pro, but it slowed to a crawl, and after several hours on the Setup screen (and my CPU and fans going to max) I shut it down. Big waste of time, and now I have to reinstall all my Mac software.
I can't imagine a cleaner installation, with a freshly formatted hard drive, fresh OSX install, fresh Parallels install and a fresh Windows install. 8 GB of Ram, half of it dedicated to the VM. I really thought after all this time this issue would have been resolved. I even tried uninstalling P7, and doing a fresh install of Parallels 6, but had the same issue.
So, my only question at this time for Parallels support is:
Has the problem been fixed yet? I am not interested in spending 8-10 hours on the phone with Parallels support again, if there is no fix. Obviously, support did not have the fix 9 months ago, and my impression was that they would just keep me on the phone, trying everything they could think of, which they did every evening until I would tell them I needed to go to bed (I think the tech was relieved to be done with the call by that point), and then they would pick it up the next evening when I called, with a new tech repeating most of what the previous tech tried the night before, until I gave up. I don't really want to go through that again. Especially since I had just bought P7 and was getting free support. I think that ends after 30 or 60 days, so I don't know if they would want to charge me now, which is why I was looking for a fix posted here.
A quick Google search shows that this, apparently, is a widespread problem. Amazing to me that it hasn't been fixed yet.
(I also want to say that it is quite insulting to get the emails about upgrading to Parallels 8 which will fix everything. I bought Parallels 7 nine months ago, I have yet to get it running, and they want me to buy Parallels 8? Insulting. As far as I am concerned, they still owe me a working version of Parallels. But I digress...)
So, what say you, Parallels support? I'm not sure what I am going to do next, I was going to try calling Parallels support, but did a search first to see if there was some definitive fix for this, and that led me to this thread, and this long rant.
Griffin
