Parallels = Slow,slow,slow

[Paul Baucom]

I am helping my father-in-law "switch". He is going from a pentium 2 500mhz machine to a 2Ghz CD2 MBP 1gig RAM. He sill insist on using microsoft money, so he bought parallels because he could use windows 2000 his preffered OS with it. Once in parallels it runs half the speed of his pentium 2. He has 15 gigs for Parrellels geast machine and has dedicated 512mb ram. Is it supposed to be this slow? If he upgrades to XP SP2 will it be faster. Otherwise it is about unuseable.

 

[David5000]

I am helping my father-in-law "switch". He is going from a pentium 2 500mhz machine to a 2Ghz CD2 MBP 1gig RAM. He sill insist on using microsoft money, so he bought parallels because he could use windows 2000 his preffered OS with it. Once in parallels it runs half the speed of his pentium 2. He has 15 gigs for Parrellels geast machine and has dedicated 512mb ram. Is it supposed to be this slow? If he upgrades to XP SP2 will it be faster. Otherwise it is about unuseable.

For a MB Pro even without Parallels, 1 GB RAM is barely adequate. Try giving the Windows 256 MB RAM instead of 512. That way there is a slim chance that OS X will be able to function. Otherwise the only solution will be to purchase at least 1 GB more RAM. 3 GB total would be even better.

That is the harsh reality.

David

 

[Purplish]

Parallels should do fine for MS Money. If that is all you are running in Windows, definitely try reducing the memory setting to 256 MB. What you are doing is giving a lot of memory to Windows, but starving OSX for memory, and Parallels runs under OSX.

It is also a good idea to go to at least 2GB memory. Apple memory is very expensive, unless cost is not an issue. You can try www.macsales.com for less expensive memory.

I am running Quicken in 256MB (2GB real memory) with great results.

 

[unused_user_name]

Remember, when using a virtual machine you have to have enough RAM to run both OSs at the same time.

Win2k is fine with about 256MB of RAM, but MacOS won't behave nicely unless it has at least a 1GB.

Add these up and you need a minimum of 1.25 GB of RAM in order to use Parallels with Win2k.

 

[Paul Baucom]

Thanks for all the advice it is just as I thought. So as a test when he is running Parallels with this configuration Mac OS should be taking a performance hit.