I just made the switch to Mac and bought a brand new iMac for Christmas. As a long time PC user, I knew I couldn't live without Windows so I did my research and bought a copy of Parallels 5.0 and Windows 7 Ultimate. I had my issues at first with install but I think I have everything sorted out except iTunes. It seems that iTunes running under Windows 7 as a virtual machine is very slow. My playback is interrupted with slight pauses or gaps in the music as if I am waiting for a buffer. It's slight, but annoying. Certainly not what I expected from the latest offering from Apple, Windows, and Parallels. Any help or suggestions? My computer specs... 21.5" 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo 4 GB of RAM ATI 4670 HD Video Card Parallels is configured as follows... 1 Processor 2 GB of RAM Optimization priority set to Virtual Machine Now I know many will say why don't I run iTunes natively under the Snow Leopard and the reason is that I do not like Mac Mail and my iPhone is sync'd to Outlook.
i switched my pvm to use both cores and it has improved win7 performance with no degradation in os x. try it. FWIW: i agree that os x email client is sh*t
I'll give it a try. Anyone else experience this issue? Anyone from the Parallels team care to comment?
Seems to me that you might have just overspent for a glorified PC. Are you using any of the Max OSX apps or are you just running 100% of your programs on Windows?? If you are, the only thing i can think of is that Win7 uses a lot of RAM and in conjunction with all your other programs (on only 2GB of Ram) might be causing your issue. I would have stuck with a PC. I'm curious to hear your motives for switching...
There are many reports of cracks and pops in sound playback in Parallels 5 on this forum. One solution that I've found is to turn down the sound quality drastically in Windows - I've set the sound driver to playback at 11.025 kHz. This prevents pops and crackles but of course everything sounds as if it came through your landline telephone. However, since you have a pretty powerful machine, why don't you run iTunes on your Mac in the background as you work in Windows?
So I've made some tweaks and now the sound quality is better. However, now that I have had some time on the machine, I can not figure out how to sync photos which are stored in iPhoto onto my iPhone. I have the folder shared out and I can see the directory, but I want to choose individual folders and not by the year which is how iPhoto organizes it. Basically I want to select a bunch of sub-folders inside of iPhoto but it only lets me select it by year.