Terribly Slow Performance V5 Win 7

A

AmarP

Bit poster
I have had Parallels 3 and 4 with Win XP2 for almost two years. Absolutely flawless performance and speed. I decided to upgrade the whole thing to V5 and Win 7 x64. Takes FOUR MINUTES to come out of hibernation (Stuck at 60% for three minutes alone). I could boot up in that much time. Anytime I come out of pause or hibernation, must wait TWO MINUTES before I can even press the start button. Otherwise, I will get 7 IE windows open at once from me trying. Then when it does "unfreeze," I get the beach ball in my Mac for 30 sec and then everything is ready to go at a snail's pace. I've turned off Aero. And I PAID FOR THIS?????


Macbook Pro
2.6 Ghz core 2 duo
4 gb 667 mhz sdram
256mb video
OS X: 10.5.8
 
I've been fooling around in Parallels quite a bit to help me get better speeds. This is what I found:

Sound: The sound card virtualisation might need a bit of work from Parallels. I've changed the settings in the sound card driver to play sounds at 11.025 kHz, that helped a lot.

Spotlight: I also turn off Spotlight indexing entirely while I run Parallels (I wrote me an Apple Service for that with Automator but you can turn it off from the Mac's terminal: just type sudo mdutil -a -i off; terminal will then ask for your password. Enter it and you're done. (To turn it back on, type sudo mdutil -a -i on.)

Full screen: I only run Parallels in full screen.

Parallels services at startup: I've used msconfig to prevent most Parallels services from loading at (Windows) startup; the only Parallels application that is running on my VM is Parallels Tools 5.0 (msconfig -> tab "System Start"). I deactivated all others.

Stardock: I deinstalled the Stardock application from Windows. This is needed by Parallels for the Mac Look feature, but since I run my VM in full screen, I don't need Stardock.

Memory: After a lot of tinkering, I'm now able to run my VM with 1024 MB assigned to it while I still can run some Mac apps reasonably well; a VM with Windows 7 runs appreciably better with 1024 MB or more assigned to it. What really helped improve switching between Mac and Windows here was turning off Spotlight. Before I'd done that, Windows 7 ran ok but trying to do something on the Mac side invoked enormous swapping activity which slowed everything down a lot. I have set the VM to be "optimized for Mac OS X".

I'm now playing with the more esoteric VM settings that are accessible inside the VM package (config.pvs): the foreground and background priorities, and the IoPriority. My current settings are ForegroundPriority 1, BackgroundPriority 0, IoPriority 1. However, so far this is a bit of Voodoo as I can't find any information on what these parameters actually do, so I'm just guessing at their function.

I'm testing the VM's speed mainly by opening one or two rather resource intensive games (Battle for Middle Earth I and Warhammer 40,000).

I currently think that the most powerful factors affecting speed - in particular startup, shutdown, and switching between Mac and Windows - are the sound settings and the state of Spotlight indexing.

Anyone else tinkering with Parallels in this way? Your experience?
 
So I've done a little bit more running on the VM. The main problems occur only coming out of Pause or Suspension. When I start up and shut down normally, it seems to run a lot smoother with considerably less lag. Anyone else have issues with performance coming out of Pause and/Suspension?

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks
 
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