Windows 10 very slow and crash-happy

Q

QuantumDotter

Junior Member
Hi all
I'm wondering if there's something I'm doing wrong. I'm running Windows 10 on Parallels 16 and I'm finding I get really terrible performance. I'm not running anything exotic: Outlook, a handful of Excel files, Chrome, Teams, etc. Not doing any big games, PhotoShop or anything like that. This is on a late 2017 iMac with the quad-core i7 (4.2GHz) and 24GB RAM. I dedicate 2 processor cores and 8GB of RAM to the VM. Graphics set to "Auto" (Best for Retina display).

When I say terrible performance, I mean that sometimes switching between windows, copying some cells from Excel or opening an email will periodically lock up the VM for up to five minutes. I've also had two complete BSOD-style crashes in the last week. It also tends to slow down everything on my Mac, though not as dramatically (it did crash the Mac once).

Is there anything I should be doing differently? Should I give it more RAM? Tinker with the graphics settings? Anything else?
 
Hi, anyone have any ideas? Just had a full on Windows crash again today, despite having run the update the dropped today. Again, wasn't running anything outside the standard Office 365 suite and even then didn't have that much open. So I don't know why it would strain the system?
 
I am having the same problem. I did a bunch of updates this week, paralells, iOS etc. and haven't been able to determine what it is. I am starting to agree its PD16. I am having windows explorer "not responding" issues a few times an hour, and also in other basic software (365, chrome etc.).
 
same issue! poor performance on latest Macbook Pro 2021 15' and crashes incl. host system!
running on batteries is terrible - despite power safe is switched off, it gets switch on again.
Until update to 16.0.1 no crash anymore when in Powersafe mode (was the case frequently under version 15).
Parallels blocks power safe on OS X host machine, hence machine continues to run.... heating up.
 
The fun continues. Just today had a full on host system freeze, where everything locked up entirely for about ten minutes except my Teams call kept working. About two hours later, full-on BSOD. At the time, I had open Teams, Outlook and Excel, that's it. Is there anyone from Parallels who can help us here, please? Right now, I'm basically having to give up, as it's just too unstable.
 
hint to parallels guys: similar error was V15 two releases before update to V16.... I guess they missed a change ;-)
 
I spent over 6 months dealing with a crash issue with support. They NEVER answered any of my questions; just bounced me from one foreign tech to another! Every one of them kept asking for a log report and ignored my questions, despite telling them over and over again, I could not supply a report because Parallels would freeze the entire system and force a reboot. Then the VM and app were destroyed from the crash and all data lost! It forced me to uninstall, reinstall, and restore the VM from Time Machine.
Two weeks ago I switched to Fusion 11.5 and it was slower than Parallels then version 12 was released. I upgraded to Fusion 12 Pro with the offer from VMWare to switch to Fusion from Parallels with a 40% discount. There is also a version of Fusion for free for personal use!
Version 12 is WONDERFUL! Not slow, doesn't crash and destroy VMs, support is great, and no more annual fees! A ONE-TIME payment and I can load it on 3 machines at no additional cost.
Good-bye Parallels because your support really does suck and I am tired of being ripped off!
 
MarkS51, I bought Parallels 16 this morning and it crashed my new 2021 MBPro. Support told me to put the vm on an external HD; it crashed. Go into preferences, change some things; it crashed. They told me to send a log.

I took the 40% discount from VMWare: Windows 10 is now up and running on my computer. Many of us cannot afford the lost productivity from screwing around with products that do not work. Thanks fo the tip!
 
I know this thread is super old, but I decreased the RAM assigned to Windows to 4GB and now everything runs smoothly. I have a 2019 MBP with 16GB of RAM. I was assigning 8GB and it was crashing my MBP hard. Constant fan spin, everything SUPER slow and lagging. I decreased it to 4GB and now the MBP is very happy AND windows is still snappy. Seems like a bug.
 
brandonf2 said:
I know this thread is super old, but I decreased the RAM assigned to Windows to 4GB and now everything runs smoothly. I have a 2019 MBP with 16GB of RAM. I was assigning 8GB and it was crashing my MBP hard. Constant fan spin, everything SUPER slow and lagging. I decreased it to 4GB and now the MBP is very happy AND windows is still snappy. Seems like a bug.
Click to expand...
Hi, could you collect the tech report once the issue reproduced and post the report's ID here please?
 
Hi all, I recently purchased an M1 Mac mini and have a Windows 10 ARM install running with only Teams, latest Edge browser and built in apps (mail/calendar configured).

I too experience the same issues as people report here. I was going nuts while increasing the RAM the performance decreased. Luckily did a forum search and found this thread. When you first create the W10 VM it defaults to 4GB which I thought was just a default so changed it. But as Brandon implies this could be the sweet spot? Kind of weird right? I have 16GB available so assigning 8-9 to the VM should leave more than enough performance for the host machine. But somehow this only makes it worse IN the VM. Outside the VM on macOS on the host everything is very smooth. I do however have the occasional mouse slowdown as was supposed to be fixed in Parallels latest release. But maybe this is due to something else, I don't know yet.

For now I will try the 4Gb thing. @parallels support anything else we can try if this doesnt solve it?

brandonf2 said:
I know this thread is super old, but I decreased the RAM assigned to Windows to 4GB and now everything runs smoothly. I have a 2019 MBP with 16GB of RAM. I was assigning 8GB and it was crashing my MBP hard. Constant fan spin, everything SUPER slow and lagging. I decreased it to 4GB and now the MBP is very happy AND windows is still snappy. Seems like a bug.
Click to expand...
 
I think I have it pinpointed to Windows Updates. I turned Windows Updates off for 7 days and then the memory usage got back to normal levels 35-40%. After turning it on again it rose to 96-99% again. What it's trying to download and install is the Windows 11 insider preview. I guess that got stuck or took a while to process. This shouldnt take up that much resources however. Maybe its a bug with the ARM version of this insider preview or it's a combination of the virtual machine and this ARM version of Windows 10. I don't know. So for me, it's not an issue with the hardware or Parallels itself so it seems.
 
After using Windows 11 preview for a small day the memory again goes back to almost 100% after a minute into using the OS. I will try and the 4Gb thing also and report back.
 
brandonf2 said:
I know this thread is super old, but I decreased the RAM assigned to Windows to 4GB and now everything runs smoothly. I have a 2019 MBP with 16GB of RAM. I was assigning 8GB and it was crashing my MBP hard. Constant fan spin, everything SUPER slow and lagging. I decreased it to 4GB and now the MBP is very happy AND windows is still snappy. Seems like a bug.
Click to expand...
Wow, I am shocked! I do not know why I tried this yesterday in my MBP 16" 2019 i9 2.3 32 GBs. I was assigning 16 GB to my VM, thinking that more memory will do it well, surprisingly enough this brought interesting problems, mainly interface slowness, I could see how windows were painted component by component, even the start menu was a pain. After setting my VM with 4 GB interface is snappy again. One interesting thing tho', when I was using 16 GB sometimes interface was fine too but suddenly become slow. I observed that in these instances, if you check your activity in ProcessHacker you can see GPU statistics while the interface is snappy and once it becomes slow in ProcessHacker GPU use goes straight to 0%. This never happens when setting VM memory to 4 GB.

I hope it gives some clues of what is going on. I thought of moving to VMWare but having to deal with double encryption to emulate a vTPM don't think is a good idea.
 
Maria@Parallels said:
Hi, could you collect the tech report once the issue reproduced and post the report's ID here please?
Click to expand...
I will do this shortly. I lost track of this thread and glad I found it again. I'm so glad my solution has helped all of you, however, it's sad that Parallels has done NOTHING to fix it except ask for a "tech report." This issue persists through all new versions of the software. Every update that has come out since posting this has the same issue. Really disappointing.
 
brandonf2 said:
I will do this shortly. I lost track of this thread and glad I found it again. I'm so glad my solution has helped all of you, however, it's sad that Parallels has done NOTHING to fix it except ask for a "tech report." This issue persists through all new versions of the software. Every update that has come out since posting this has the same issue. Really disappointing.
Click to expand...
Hello,
we understand your concern but with our the technical report we will be unable to correctly understand and find the root cause of the issue, that is why we request it.
Could you please provide us with the technical report if it possible?
 
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