Parallels is cooking my MacBook Pro

K

keathmilligan

Bit poster
When I run Parallels on laptop, the fan kicks on full blast and the computer gets very hot. It immediately cools off when I shut down Parallels. I've tried tweaking the performance settings, but nothing seems to affect this.

Is there anything I can do to calm Parallels down a bit?
 
Since this is the Windows Guest forum, I assume your fan runs fast when you're running Windows XP as a guest OS?

I have found my MacBook Pro also runs a bit hot and sometimes fans run at a higher speed.

I would suggest you try smcFanControl which will allow you to set the minimum fan speed to a higher number (2000 rpm) than the default OS X speed (1000 rpm). A faster fan will mean less heat and let times the fan has to kick into warp speed to cool.

Also, don't tell anyone I said this, but VMWare Fusion runs somewhat cooler than Parallels using a Windows XP guest OS. The 1.0 release of Fusion just came out today.
 
SMCFanControl is the answer. Run your fans at about 4500 or so while you have Parallels running.

Another thing you might do is to look and see if anything in your Windows Guest is using a ton of CPU. I found one day that my MBP was still hot even with the fans at 4500. I looked in my Windows Guest and some flash thing in FireFox was playing and it was causing the Windows CPU to go to 100%. As soon as I closed FireFox or went to another page it calmed down and the computer cooled down.

M
 
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