Bata 4 very unstable with Win XP

A

ardhall

Bit poster
I installed beta 4 itself yesterday on a new and with up to date Mac OS X patches without problems.

I then tried to install Windows XP as a guest OS and have run into several problems:

- At the end of initial installation where XP reboots for normal operation there was a crash (kernel panic) with Mac OS X.

- The system rebooted uneventfully and I could start XP. Display, network and audio all appear to work but even basic applications do not work reliably.

For example,
+ applets in the control panel don't work.

+ Internet Explorer becomes unresponsive although the window can still be moved if I attempt to access the MS update service. After this I can't start apps either - no response from the Windows popup menu

+ three fingered salute doesn't work.

+ A reboot of the VM restores operation and I can access basic web pages in IE but again failure happens after accessing update.

Not a good start at all. I have the impression that Parallels is not ready for prime time.
 
Very stable experience for me on the contrary

What machine are you running it on?

I also installed the software on a brand new MBP15 2GHz and the whole process has been a breeze so far. I installed XP Pro SP2, Office, some antivirus software etc...

The machine never froze, explorer works fine, putting to sleep or waking is no problem, neither screen saver, etc

I have just a problem to eject 1 cd and had to shutdown the machine so that the CD would appear on the Mac desktop.

Silaxe
 
I'm running it on a core duo mac mini with 2 gb of ram and I find it so stable that I'm finally going ahead and installing all my development software and getting ready to seriously use this thing.

The *only* issue I see is from time to time when I try to start the XP VM, I get an error message that Parallels couldn't allocate memory. If I shut my mac programs and restart the VM, it boots fine. Then I can open my mac programs again.

All in all, I'm impressed with beta 4.
 
Silaxe said:
What machine are you running it on?

I also installed the software on a brand new MBP15 2GHz and the whole process has been a breeze so far. I installed XP Pro SP2, Office, some antivirus software etc...

The machine never froze, explorer works fine, putting to sleep or waking is no problem, neither screen saver, etc

I have just a problem to eject 1 cd and had to shutdown the machine so that the CD would appear on the Mac desktop.

Silaxe
Click to expand...

machine is MBP with fastest CPU and 2GB memory.
 
I installed beta 4 on my 17" imac (1GB RAM) and it runs XP Home like a dream. The parallels installation (upgrade from beta 3) appeared to lock up the mac for about 30 seconds to 1 minute but then everything worked fine. The XP install hung on the "configuring devices..." but I restarted it a couple of times and it worked fine - didn't seem to like having iTunes open (for some reason!) during the XP install but once installed it works great. The movable / hideable toolbar is great and sound works lovely.

One question: if I want to have another user on the same mac (my wife) able to access the virtual machine (which I've installed in /Users/shared...) I've set the permissions to 777 and made her an admin (gulp!) but with only her logged in to the mac I get some message about unable to get a lock on the config file. Pressing OK means it works fine but why do I get this message? Any ideas? (I assume the license covers this)

In the final any chance of some form of video acceleration - that would make it a perfect product ;)
 
Last edited:
ardhall -- you need to delete your VM and reinstall XP. I can just about guarantee that will solve your problems. It is most like the kernal panic left your VM in a slightly corrupted state. I had the exact same thing happen in beta 3. When I deleted the VM and created a new one, this time without any kernal panics during install, it works fine.

Except for my little Wifi issues .. but that's a different thread.
 
And be sure to make a clone once you have your install done. Once I get WIndows setup the way I want, with the needed programs all installed, I then made a clone, and whenever I add a program, I make another clone. Having this most recent baseline machine backed up has saved me a number of times.
 
I find beta 4 (and 3) to be very stable. Aside from some CD and video [redraw] issues I have had no problems. I'm using Cisco VPN's, running Oracle databases, doing cross platform development, etc.. In fact, I'm quite surprised at how stable it is for a beta. I've got all sorts of deep system utilities running as well that I thought would crash it for certain (TaskInfo to name one) but it hums along just fine. I have the OS X side talking to the XP side with ease on all fronts - file I/O, database communications, etc..

In terms of the XP OS, I've created VMs using WinXP SP0 patched up to SP2, as well as WinXP SP2 OEM with equal results. I'm also running Solaris 10 with only a network adapter issue left to overcome (that I haven't had time to work on).

I did notice that the VMs leak memory so a reboot usually helps once in a while but otherwise it looks good. Try creating a fresh VM and installing from scratch and see how stable the base OS is before doing anything else.

MacBook Pro 2.16
OS 10.4.6
Parallels 2.1b4
XP SP2
Solaris 10 1-06
 
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