windows xp, idle = 15% cpu on macos?

L

Laurent

Bit poster
Hi

Is it normal that after a fresh reboot with no app running on the windows xp vm, no disk or network activity showing, the parallels process shows 12-20% cpu usage ?
(I turned on advanced power management in windows vm but that didn't really help, maybe changed the minimum from 15 to 12, at best)


I have 2gb of real memory and 768mb assigned to parallels's vm so I don't think I have any memory problems

cpu usage eats up battery and while I understand some mimimum is probably needed I would have hoped for a lower number (5%?) If I recall other vm products on windows were showing much lower cpu usage when the os in the vm was itself idle
 
I found removing the sound from the VM configuration reduces the CPU load by almost 10%. If there are any unused services running on your VM, it would be helpful to turn those off as well. With basic services loaded and no applications, the process running the Windows XP VM will idle between 3-4%. Pausing the VM will reduce the load even more, no more than 1% CPU.
 
pdxmbp said:
I found removing the sound from the VM configuration reduces the CPU load by almost 10%.
Click to expand...
Are you running with hardware acceleration n the guest or software sound emulation?
 
Just tried with a running VM.

I just tried muting the sound from the VM. Without muting i had an utilization of about 10-11 % while after clicking Devices -> Sound -> Mute it went to 6 %.

Will try turning of sound entirely and verify utilization.
 
Thanks guys, maybe Parallels can look into this as it does sound high (as no process is using the sound device inside windows (I don't have any sound effects setup beside stdard startup/shutdown sounds))
 
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