I'm using a Mac Pro 2,66Ghz with a Radeon X1900 512MB Graphics Card and 2 Apple Studio Displays 20". OS: Mac OS X 10.4.10 and Windows XP SP2 I recently found out that Parallels is to blame for my continuous crashes and screen distortions. From the moment that I start the guest OS in Parallels the upper Apple Menu bar gets distorted. This means that all text commands are gone and I see garbage pixels. This will go away once I change to a different application. The computer crashes a lot when some fancy Quartz effects are showing. It happens a lot when I minimize a window and you see the shrinking animation. It also happens when I activate Expose, showing all the windows in miniature form. I already changed the minimize effect to 'Scale Effect' instead of 'Genie effect'. That ended the crashes when minimizing. But the other crashes still occur. When the crash occurs it happens in the middle of the animation. The screen will get frozen and remains in this state. It's not possible to move the cursor or use the keyboard. However all the applications that were running in the background continue to run. For example iTunes will continue playing music. I can ssh to the crashed computer and see all the active processes using the top command. When the computer is in a crashed state Parallels will use 100% of the processors. It's not possible to kill the Parallels process or restart the finder. I have to restart the Mac by hand. When the computer doesn't crash I get a lot of screen distortions in the form of horizontal lines or fixed coloured pixels. These distortions occur in all applications. They don't happen when Parallels is not running. I hoped that by updating the X1900 graphics card with the latest firmware, that was released last week, the problems would go away. But they didn't. I already tried reinstalling Mac OS X and Parallels. That didn't help. Does anyone have a solution? David
Screenshot Here is a screenshot to illustrate what happens with the Apple Menu Bar when Parallels is starting its guest OS. http://kunst.phlimburg.be/misc/distortedparallels.png
Hello, have you installed Parallels Tools? If yes, have you tried to reinstall them to have this issue solved? Best regards, Alicia.
Hi Alicia, I did install the latest version of Parallel Tools. I've now reinstalled it and let you know if the problem remains. Best regards, David Vandenborn
Hello, it's the first time we get report on such issue and so far I can only suppose that it is some Mac's hardware related problem which can occur while Parallels Desktop is running because it utilises a considerable amount of system resources to run a guest OS. It can be a CPU or video display board cooling problem or a memory problem. I can recommend you to make a request to the Apple support. And please, keep me informed about the result. Best regards, Alicia.
Hi Alicia, I reinstalled Parallel Tools but the problem persists. I'm going to perform a hardware test and see if that brings up any problems. Though no other applications have this behaviour. The Mac Pro never crashes when I'm not using Parallels... Best regards, David
dvdborn, so it's just another confirmation that some hardware doesn't manage to run Parallels I suppose. Best regards, Alicia.
