I'm trialing running Parallels on a MacBook Pro running Big Sur: I have the Parallels trial up and running with Windows 10 and Mojave installed as VMs. 1. I can see the shared folders in Windows 10 but in Mojave I can't see the folders I wish to see even though I have "Share All Folders" and a specific custom folder allocated. I can see the desktop and iCloud items but at Macintosh HD level, I only see this VM user. What am I doing wrong? 2. There seems to be a log in glitch where Parallels thinks that the Caps Lock is on and therefore tells me that my password is wrong - Not all the time but sometimes. 3. Mojave is very slow to start up - slower than when I run it from an external HDD - is this normal? Windows 10 seems to be instant. Also Mojave is fuzzy whereas Windows seems crystal clear. 4. I tried to load Windows 95 in order to run an old game - but it wont see the ISO in order to install. Is this not possible? Is it just too old? So many questions I know. But the answers will affect whether I actually buy Parallels in the end. So far it's not doing it for me. Thanks
It is possible to run W95 as a virtual machine in W10, so I'd suspect it probably is possible to get it working in Parallels. However as outlined here: https://www.howtogeek.com/329301/how-to-install-windows-95-in-a-virtual-machine/ It needs a little 'trickery' to actually handle the install. This gives how to generate the ISO and the boot disk for it. Many old games like this will run under things like Windows XP, so it might be worth trying this first. What resources have you set the Mojave VM to 'have'?. Number of processor cores and memory?. Mojave will slow down if it is short of memory,. or of disk space. Mine just took 20 seconds from a standing start to being logged in. Being slower than on an external drive, suggests some resource is running low when you are doing this from the internal drive. In the 'settings', 'security' tab for the VM, have you possibly got the button to 'isolate the virtual machine' made?. This would prevent the VM from accessing the host drive. Also in 'hardware', check the 'boot order' tab. It could be pausing to check for CD's and external drives at this point. Your 'fuzziness', might be the display resolution problem outlined here: https://kb.parallels.com/114700 The caps lock one is normally a 'localization' problem. Have a look in this thread, which mentions this, and also another syncronisation problem: https://forum.parallels.com/threads/caps-lock-sticks-permanently.114978/
Hi RogerH6, Thanks for the detailed response. 1. The W95 procedure looks to be quite tricky. Also the article uses Virtual Box rather than Parallels - so it may take a bit of getting ones head around. I tried running a virtual WinXP and launching the game from that, but it failed. I must go another way to work....perhaps try from Windows 7? 2. For Mojave I had 2Gb Ram and the number of cores was greyed out. It was set to unlimited resources. I upped the Ram and checked the Boot order too. I did have a DVD attached yesterday, but it was way down the order. Today it booted up in about 30sx without the DVD. The graphics is set for best for Retina display and is still a little fuzzy and not full screen. 3. I checked the "isolate VM' button and that is set to 'off.' There seems to be nothing I can do to share things between host and VM except for iCloud and my iCloud is almost full so I don't want more things there. Would it make a difference that my Parallels folder is not in "Documents"? It was maxing out my iCloud so I chose a different place to install. I'm despairing about this now since my trial is up today (I thought I got 30 days, but it seems not). 4. The 'Caps Lock' seems to be ok today. I'm totally perplexed about not being able to share files in Mojave, since I can with Win10. I don't know what else to try. Could it be a restriction of the trial version? Perhaps I will try using Boot Camp instead. It might be better for Mojave. :-(
I must admit, I believe the likelyhood of getting W95 to actually run and be useable to be very low. Problem is that it allows things to access all of the hardware without restrictions, and modern OS's really aren't designed to allow this. Problem is a game written to run in this, will assume it can do this type of hardware access. Honestly, I think I'd probably just run an old machine to run the game!... 2GB RAM is very low for Mojave. Can you allocate more?. It 'requires; at least 2GB, and 12.5GB of disk space. If your machine only has 2GB, then it'll be having to swap pretty much everything out to make space to run Mojave. Could well explsin the sloth, since when running on the internal drive this will be happening to the same drive the OS is loading from. Result lots of disk activity.... Where are you actually looking for the shared stuff?. Shared folders on the left of the finder. Shared folders inside this. Then 'Home'. Opens the user home directory for my Big Sur machine.
