Parallels in Leopard is achingly slow!

L

linovari

Junior Member
Hi,

I'm a big fan of Parallels; on the advice of a friend I tried VM Fusion, and was left singularly unimpressed, nevertheless I have some concerns with the way Parallels works on my iMac (Intel). It's painfully slow: clicking on the start bar, the menu items don't appear for what could be a minute, it could be more or maybe even a little less than that, but it's so frustrating I'm too annoyed to time it to get an exact time. And that is across the board. I can't say it was blazingly fast in Tiger, but in Leopard it's tedious to do even the simplest things. I guess I could start up Boot Camp, but I'm not yet convinced that switching over to a Windows machine is the answer. I like the concept of running two operating systems at once, as well as the convenience of switching back to my mac as soon as I'm done with windows stuff.

If anyone has experienced similar problems and has a solution or even a work around I would appreciate any advice.

Thanks.
 
Parallels slow in Leopard

Hi, I'm not sure what the etiquette is about replying to one's own posts, but here goes anyway! I trolled around the Parallels site and found some useful information: I turned off virtual memory allocation, and upped the RAM allocation to 300 MB. While, initially, it's still very slow, once it settles(?) down it's as fast as it ever was, which is pretty fast. Word on my iMac is not always a pleasant experience, but in Windows via Parallels it's as fast as it is on a Windows machine. It's still a bit flaky, there is certainly a lag-time between mouse clicks, which are certainly noticeable if you look for them, but otherwise the job gets done.

I presume Parallels is working on a solution, they say they are, which is a good thing. Nevertheless, there still the overall speed issue which needs to be resolved. Having read a number of posts it would seem that the overall performance of Parallels is not just os and machine dependent but there is also a compatibility issue. I realise that it's a difficult job to write software that takes into account all the myriad variations, but I'm sticking with Parallels: I like the look and feel, and I'm willing to go with them as they improve. They have my vote of support.
 
I just upgraded to 5570 and it works fine. I've got 3GB ram, of which 1.4 is allocated to Parallels. I run some memory-intensive day trading software on Windows and lots of stuff on my Mac, with no performance hit. The only time I notice a problem is when I load any Adobe program (Photoshop, Lightroom, etc) but they slow things down even when OSX is exclusive :-)
 
RAM is the key

Hi, it would seem that the moral of the story is to have lots of RAM. I've always suspected that that the was the problem - not having enough RAM -, now you've confirmed it. Thanks for your insight.
 
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