I have enough RAM to give Parallels more than the recommended 128MB max memory. Yet when I increase the memory to 256MB, it says that exceeding the recommended max may "downgrade virtual machine performance as well as the primary OS one" -- is that true? Does increasing Parallel's memory downgrade perfomance? I thought that increasing the memory would actually boost performance. Thanks for any help... -S
Yes. Allocating too much memory to Parallels can bring your system to a crawl if taken to the extreme. Parallels is still an App running inside OSX. So if that 1 App deprives OSX of memory it needs to run all the other stuff that is going on, it will resort to virtual memory (disk) and this will literally crawl. Always allocate the minimum amount of RAM to your VMs that still provides good performance. Depending on what you do, this could be anywhere from 128M->1GB. BTW, I'm guess you only have 1MB of ram, because Parallels recommending 128M seems low. If that's the case, you really want to be consertive, because 1MB is the bare minimum for Parallels and OSX to coexist at a reasonable speed in most cases.
Thanks for the reply, VTMac. Actually I have 2GB of RAM installed on my Mac Mini, and that's why I thought it would be ok to give Parallels 256MB. Thanks again for the help.
