I'm not sure if I'm in the right forum for this, but here goes: I have a Mac Mini (late 2010) with 8 GM RAM, running Parallels 6. I have one VM, running Windows 7. When I first set this up almost a year ago it ran pretty well. It started bogging down over time. Eventually it was taking 20-30 minutes to fully boot (mostly because of the avalanche of updates from Parallels, Windows, anti-virus, etc.). A few weeks ago it took a full hour for Windows to be up and running to the point of being responsive and workable. That was too much. After some research I reduced the amount of RAM allocated from 4 to 2 GB (doesn't make sense, but it was recommended somewhere), cleared all caches, deleted a lot of junk files, turned off all sexiness so it looks like I'm running Windows NT, and now it's acceptable again. Most of the time. I have turned on the CPU and RAM meters, and I'm amazed at how often the CPU spikes up to 100%. Right now, for example; I'm downloading a large file, and the CPU has been locked on 100% for about 30 minutes. RAM is around 70%. Even when I'm not downloading, as Windows starts up it sits at 100% CPU for four or five minutes straight. Then, as I'm using it, every few minutes it cranks up to 100% for 10-15 seconds and then goes back to normal (25% or so). During these spikes the computer is just about frozen. Can't really do anything without it being extremely slow and unresponsive. ---> IS THIS NORMAL??? <--- I suspect not. More importantly, how do I figure out what the #$%$# is stealing all that CPU power during those spikes? PLEASE HELP! Thanks! e d
