Playing music from Windows 8 VM makes my Mac slow?

I'm running Windows 8 in a Parallels 8 vm on my Macbook Pro (2012 Retina Model, 16GB RAM).

I have the vm configured to use 4 cores and 4GB of RAM. These are the same specs I had in my separate Windows 7 VM.

With my Windows 7 VM, I was able to listen to music (via Zune running on the VM) with no issues.

With my Windows 8 VM (not an upgrade from Windows 7; a completely separate VM), when I listen to music, my Mac starts slowing down horribly. Browsing is slow, navigating the computer in general is slow, and there's a very visible lag when minimizing/maximizing windows. When I look at the system resources on my Mac, they're barely impacted at all. CPU, RAM, and disk usage all appear normal, but performance is awful. All I have to do is pause the music on the VM, and performance returns to normal.

I've tried uninstalling the sound driver on the VM and reinstalling the Parallels Tools, but it made no difference.

Does anyone have any ideas what to look at next?

 

I believe, gentle readers, that I have resolved this. The Zune software, when left idle (including while playing music), switches to the graphically intense "Now Playing" screen by default. When I pause the music, it leaves that view. I've turned off that option (which I had apparently already turned off on my Win 7 vm), and I think all is well.

Thanks for reading.

 

Hi Icewind,

Thanks for reporting the issue and sharing the solution! Could you please describe the settings you changed in a bit more detail so that we can include it to our knowledge base?

 

In the Zune software, click Settings at the top of the screen.

Select Software, then Display.

Under the Now Playing section, uncheck the box for, "Automatically show the Now Playing screen when Zune software is idle" and click OK.