Parallels 6, Lion and the new Mac Mini

I upgraded and migrated my Parallels 5 to my new Mac Mini running 10.7 "Lion" - and of course I had to shell out for the upgrade to Parallels 6. All went fine in the upgrade, except that it was interminably slow. It intially took about 20 minutes for Windows XP to launch. Apps launched took about 5 minutes.

Apple connected me to Parallels support in India. The nice gentleman there spent several hours removing various temp files, cleaning the hard drive and doing basic Windows XP maintenance tasks. It sped up the system somewhat, but despite a computer many times faster than my old Mini, it's still operating much, much slower. What gives? I expected a super-fast experience with a brand new much faster Mac and an "upgrade" - but all I got so far was one big 6 hour long downgrade installation.

It's virtually unusable. And it bogs down my entire system. Forget about switching apps or surfing the web in Safari. A five minute wait to switch apps. Ludicrous.

Any thought or suggestions beyond routine maintenance tasks? (Please no more three hour calls to India!).

 

I was tiring of the terrible slowness, so I decided to simply do a fresh install of Win XP.

As i would have hoped, the install itself was blazingly fast - like watching an install on legacy equipment in fast motion. Even the dreaded install of Virus software went super fast. Same with the first apps I've installed, very fast.

Overall system responsiveness has returned, I can now easily switch between the VM and Mac OS apps. All this on 2 gigs of RAM. I'll upgrade to 8 gigs later this week and expect it may get even snappier, we'll see. The Activity Monitor shows the VM and the Mac OS use very little RAM - around gig, all told. With this responsiveness, i may consider installing Windows 7.

BTW, i installed with the Windows look and feel, rather than the Mac.

 

The good news is after installing 8 gigs of RAM on the new Mini, the blazing performance from before is even better. Switching between apps is instant and booting XP takes a mere 10 seconds.

Watching the Mac Activity Monitor shows the new OS (10.7) and XP+Parallels likes to use about 3 gigs of memory. The difference is truly astounding. The previous recommendation remains: do a fresh install; but have at least 4 gigs of memory. I just couldn't be more pleased.