Parallels makes both OS's unusably slow

Hi,

I've got a MacBook 13", 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo.

I installed Parallels trial, trasported over Windows XP from my Thinkpad.

Impossibly slow. I can't work on the Mac side when parallels is running at all, and the Windows side also unusably slow.

I upgraded from a total of 2Gig memory on the MacBook to 4Gig, and assigned 2304 MB to the virtual machine. Amazingly, the memory upgrade made no difference at all.

The MacBook makes noises as if the disk is thrashing terriby.

I read this forum on speeding up Parallels, and tried some things, but nothing helped.

I very much want to buy/use it, but I don't know what to do right now. Any help would be appreciated.

--Steve D.

 

Forgot to mention, my HDD is 160GB, and I have 16GB available. --SD

 

10% disk space free (16GB out of 160) is very low, which will slow everything down. You need to either get a bigger disk, or clean up enough to get to around 20-25% free. You've probably also got a lot of fragmentation on your disk, since you're low on disk space. That also contributes to the slowdown.

I also probably wouldn't assign so much space to the virtual machine - maybe 1 to 1.5GB. You can use Task Manager in XP to see how much memory it is using/needs.

That said; I have a similar configuration - MacBook Pro, 2.6GHz, 4GB memory, and I'm not totally satisfied with the speed. A bigger/faster disk helps, as well as making sure there aren't too many Mac process competing for memory/etc. Safari is notorious for chewing up virtual memory, which can slow things down due to thrashing.