Parallels & Vista unbearably slow

Phaser

Phaser

Phaser

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Joined
17 Mar 2004
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1,562
Decided to give Parallels a go today as I want to use Cool Edit (Only on Windows).

Got Vista on there, and i'm suprised at how slow everything is.

If you click the start menu for example, you have to wait about 30 seconds for the spinning disk icon to dissapear and the menu to pop up. I wasn't expecting amazing speeds but at the moment its pretty much unusable.

Got a 2.2ghz Core 2 Duo MacBook and 1GB RAM (Is the RAM my problem?) Ordered 4GB from Crucial yesterday so hopefully i'l notice a difference....
 
Phaser said:
Good to hear, is there anything I can do in the meantime in Vista to speed things up a little?
Click to expand...

Nah. Vista wants tons of RAM. Upgrade to 2Gb+ if you are serious about running VMs.

I usually use Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs in my Parallels session. It's a proper MS stripped down version of XP SP2 that runs on minimal RAM.
 
Ouch, Vista on 1 GiB RAM as a VM? XP is bad enough. I put Parallels on my sister's MacBook with a gig of RAM and installed XP and Office on it, and it was unusably slow when allotted 512 MiB. I had to cut it to 256 to make OS X behave itself. another gig or three are on the way when birthday time comes around. :p
 
BillytheImpaler said:
Ouch, Vista on 1 GiB RAM as a VM? XP is bad enough. I put Parallels on my sister's MacBook with a gig of RAM and installed XP and Office on it, and it was unusably slow when allotted 512 MiB. I had to cut it to 256 to make OS X behave itself. another gig or three are on the way when birthday time comes around. :p
Click to expand...

Has she/you tried NeoOffice for OS X? It's free and avoids my having to fire up Parallels/Fusion to work on spreadsheets, letters etc.
 
Yes, I've given her that and she's got Office for Mac 2004. However, she needs to run some Windows-specific software for her job so being able to run them in OS X was a major selling point in convincing her to get a Mac. The upshot is that I don't have to clean out Windows nasties every six months.
 
Turn off;

UAC (User Access Control)
Windows Defender
Indexing
Windows Security Notifcations
Aero

Oh, and run more RAM.. virtual machines hog memory usage as it is.

Vista moreso than XP (with the sfx on)
 
Phaser said:
OMG OMG OMG!

I've never used Parallels or Vista before so had no idea what to expect. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Don't worry, that's the beauty of life; you live and learn.

Now you know, so you can sort it :)

What version of Vista did you get?
 
Ultimate. Although I whacked on my old copy of XP and it was slightly better.

My 4GB got delivered yesterday but I haven't got one of those bloody tiny screwdrivers to install it! :D
 
I was pleasantly suprised at how cheap Vista Ultimate (OEM) was (£160!!), will definitely whack it on my Mac Pro when it gets here*

*So I can play some tidy games, nothing more.
 
Why waste the money on Ultimate when Premium Home for about £100 will do for running Vista on a Mac Pro. Most of the extra features under Ultimate the Mac does out the box.
 
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