I have been seeing CPU usage for Paralles at a minimum 30%. I disabled "Stylers" toolbar, and it cut my cpu usage in half! If any of you are experienceing this, try it, and let me know.
What is the "stylers" tool bar? I've been having high CPU usage. I can't seem to pin down a pattern. Sometimes I run parallels and never have a problem, others it runs at 105% CPU. It's very frustrating! What exactly is the stylers toolbar?
My experience has been that when it spikes to over 100% its almost always either XP downloading the latest set of patches or Macafee downloading and installing the latest virus definitions.
I run Nod32 from www.eset.co.uk. We use it at work, gets good reviews and seems much more light-weight than McAfee/Norton/F-secure. Seems ideal for a virtualised environment where you want it to be as light-weight as possible to not hog resources. Cheers Russell
Could XP automatic updates be the culprit? It was mentioned above about the XP updates. I disabled automatic updates and cpu usage immediately dropped.
A little more info... I tried accessing microsoft update via the web and the high utilization came back. It seems that on my machine whenever Windows tries to update either by automatic update or via windows update that the svchost process starts to utilize 99-100% of the CPU in Windows. As soon as I end the process the utilization goes back to normal. So, now that I think I've identified the problem....I wonder how it can be fixed. I've been a Windows user long enough to know that I can't let it go too long without an update.
I believe its disk access. Whenever the VM has to do a lot of disk access it pushes the CPU to do that. I've noticed my compile times are faster which means that disk access goes up, but the whole computer seems to grind to a halt whenever its a really large amount.
