Quickbooks under xp under Parallels under Leopard

C

crenelle

Junior Member
1 mo old MacBook with 4 GB RAM
Leopard 10.5.2
Windows xp fully activated and updated
Current Parallels
Quickbooks 2007 or 2008

After using Quickbooks for a while, when it is user idle for a few minutes, some unknown task running under xp appears to go hog wild and take up 100% of the cpu allotment to xp, giving the appearance that Quickbooks and xp have frozen. This lockup doesn't occur when Quickbooks is not running. The usual fix is to force quit Parallels. Work can actually get done with Quickbooks for some time before the freeze occurs.

Intuit says running under xp under Parallels is not one of their supported environments. I imagine that it is becoming one of their more popular ones, tho.

I believe the exact same misbehavior occurs under VMware Fusion. The question is, where is a workaround or fix most likely to come from?

Is anyone else seeing this?

-Mike
 
Is your qbw data file on your VM disk, or is it in a Mac folder?

I haven't seen what you describe (yet), however I have found that QuickBooks is the only program I have that cannot access files via a Windows share, but only via a Parallels shared folder. Yet, I have found updating a database via a Parallels shared folder (via Microsoft Access) is about 10 times slower than via a Windows share. So, I'm sharing my data from my Mac documents folder by both methods. Sigh.

To my mind this slow-down indicates something very wrong about the way Parallels is providing access to Mac folders. If your data file is in a Mac folder...try it on your virtual HDD. If the problem goes away, you may need to write a small batch file to copy the folder to Windows, run QB, and then copy the file back until the Parallels team improves their sharing technology.

Cheers,
Karl
 
If the files are in the VM, then perhaps there is something amiss with the QB Update Agent or some other background thing that QB has going on?

I take it that when it locks up, it really locks up, so you cannot do a ctrl-alt-del to get Task Manager and see if some other process is running? If it happens consistently, you could just leave Task Manager running, process pane, sorted by CPU and resize QB so that you can see Task Manager - then when it does lock up, you'll at least have a snapshot of what was happening?

Karl
 
If I am very patient, xp will actually respond to mouse clicks and drags. But I have to be very, very patient. Rrrrreally patient. So far I haven't been patient enough to see what's eating all the cycles by popping the task manager window; maybe this weekend.

I'm more likely to just set up BootCamp and a hard xp partition on the hard disk to see if that solves matters.

-Mike
 
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