Sound broken and Guest OS Win98SE very slow

Hello,

I am just evaluating Parallels Workstation Trial Version. I am evaluating for two different uses.
At work, I have it installed with Win2000 as Guest OS on a WinXP Pro Host (Ahtlon XP 2200, 512 MB RAM). There it seemes to be fine. I am nearly ready to buy it for work. At home, I tried it for my privat use, I installed Win98SE as Guest OS on a WinXP Pro Host (Athlon X2-3800, 2048 MB RAM). Win98SE seemes to be very slow (slower as my Win2000 install at work on a pc that has much less power.). Sound seems not to work correctly, its not more than a loud noise with sometimes, a view seconds where it sounds correct, yesterday Win98SE even crased in the VM while I tried out Sound again. As another test for the sound issue I tried a DSL Image (Damn Small Linux) there I had sound but it was much to slow, the sound played at half the speed (at least it sounded like that). The Sound under Linux problem I saw in another post in this forum, too. The last thing I tried was a Image of the AROS OS, this did not even boot up (o.k. in this case, parallels does not list this as supported os). Any suggestions for my problem with the slow runnning Win98SE as Guest or the soundproblem?

Greetings...
Rockford

 

I can only partially help/sympathy as I'm not running Win98 - but 2K is having sound issues for me as well. It seems to happen when to many short sounds play in rapid sequence (like the bell during programming errors).

I turned off any acceleration. Sometimes, if it's a hang, I can wait it out and it will eventually come back (after 3 or 4 minutes). At other times, I can suspend the VM, then restart Parallels and wake the VM. Of course I only do this when I'm about to loose an hour of work.

Most of the time, Parallels is just spinning out of control eating up 150% of the CPU. At that point you just have to reset. There seems to be a bug of some kind in the sound driver. I haven't seen this happen in XP or 2003 however.

 

Hi, thanks for your answer.

Yes, sound somewhat famliar. For example the "windows startsound" nearly sounds o.k. then I tested some small wav Files all I got where some strange noises.

I tried turning of accelaration as well, it did not help. Then it came to my mind, that perhaps the cool & quit of the athlon x2 could be troublesome so I turned that of as well. Sadly this did not work, too. For my pc at work this is not a big issue, cause I would like to test login scripts etc. in a VM under 2K and XP, so I´ll probably buy a copy of parallels for work when the trial ends. Anyway for my privat use at home I really would like to have working sound support.

EDIT: I just tried the Linux VM with sound, this time without accelleration and parallels workstation even crashed! A window openend that let me send a screenshot and some data as bugreport to prarallels (what I did then).

Greetings...
Rockford

 

Update:

I tried the" loopback-sounddevice" and everything seems to work without a problem. VM runs smooth and seems o.k. Naturaly wiht the loopback-sounddevice I have no sound. So I am still hoping for an answer if there is hope for a fix to have the real sounddevice working o.k.?

Today a requester in paralles workstation popped up saying "5 days till your trial is over, click here to buy". I really would like to do this "click here and buy" but without working sound I am not that happy. So I would be happy to hear something from paralles relating to this sound issue. Searching the forum I found some more people who seem to have the same or a simmilar problem. Somtimes disabling acceleration seems to help a little (as suggest in this treat from MicroDev), but for me even this is not working.

Greetings...
Rockford

 

Rockford - we will investigate your issue. Thanks for reporting!