problems allocating vertual memory...

I am running parallels 6 on a power mac with 8 GBs of RAM and 8 CPUs. I am running Windows XP and OS X 10.5.8. When I run parallels it runs a little choppy so I tried increasing my memory. For some reason parallels recommends no more than 1 GB RAM. Even stranger - I'm pretty sure that last week it recommended up to 3 GBs.

Any ideas how to fix this?

Thanks in advance.

 

I noticed something else when launching parallels today. On startup I got the following message "Starting the virtual machine may slow down other virtual machines running on your Mac..." I don't have any other virtual machines. Maybe there is some memory being allocated to my ghost machine?

Should I delete all of my virtual machines and try again?

Thanks.

 

I deleted my virtual machine, unistalled parallels and re-installed. This solved the error message on launch but I still can't allocate more than 1 gig of memory to the programs. Stumped and would appreciate any ideas.

 

Am I really the only person to have this problem?

 

Still hoping for help. All ideas welcome

 

I tried uninstalling parallels, deleting all files associated with parallels and re-installing. Still no go with allocating more memory but when I asked parallels to work off of bootcamp partitiion it created two VMs. I have a hard drive that is dedicated for windows XP NOT a partitioned drive but perhaps this is the problem? Does anyone have any ideas with this new info?

One VM was called My Boot Camp and the other was called Windows XP.

 

I've put a new hard drive in my computer and installed a fresh copy of windows XP on it (using bootcamp). I uninstalled and re-installed parallels and created a new virtual machine. It still won't let me allocate memory to the new vm. Does anyone know if VMWare would be a better option for me?