Parallels 5.0 General Malaise

I'm running a Mac Mini and have just upgraded from 4.0 to 5.0 and so far it has been a very unhappy experience. I upgraded because with Parallels 4.0 the USB connection never really worked properly for me.

With 5.0 I have been faced with the following problems:

1. Tools has taken over an hour for each of my two WinXP systems and one Win7 system.

2. WinXP now crawls. 5 to 10 minutes for each mouse click to be acknowledged. CPU usage is generally between 15 and 35 percent with some peaks up to 100 percent.

3. Running something as simple as Belarc Advisor takes 35 minutes to complete.

4. The video is completely unsatisfactory: Any programs running on the Mac side show through the WinXP desktop as black boxes which flash off and on. Closing a Mac program causes the WinXP desktop to go completely black. This is sorted out by leaving full screen mode and going to window mode and then back to full screen.

5. From time to time CTL and ALT do not bring up the Mac menu bar at the top for the Parallels application nor the Mac menu at the bottom of the screen which means a reboot.

I'll be going back to 4.0 as soon as I can. Just a pity about the upgrade costs - time and money.

 

i have installed on two minis from four to five. settings could be the problem. i have hardware set to one processor. memory in prefs set to 1000. memory in configure set to 1000. and video memory to 256gb. hope this helps.

 

Decreasing the screen resolution in Windows (XP and Vista) from 1680 x 1050 to 1440 x 900 seems to solve the display problem. Other display resolutions (even ones larger than my physical screen!) also seem to work.

What is now needed is a resolution of the performance problems. Twenty minutes to launch a browser is really not very good.