Parallels 17 (Pro) Issues

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KristianS1

Member
It seems we have to go through these raft of bugs every time there is a new release. Sigh. Parallels 16 was working nicely.
Running on a Mac Pro 2019 with 16 cores, and a Window 10 VM with 64MB RAM and 22 virtual cores.
  • Mouse cursor sometimes gets stuck on last cursor
  • Generally poor graphics performance
    • Full screen YouTube can hang for a few seconds)
    • Playback isn't very smooth
    • Scrolling text in editor windows slow/jumpy
  • Sometimes get crackling sound from VM audio after switching to host OS
Is it possible to downgrade? This is not at all acceptable.
 
I reinstalled Parallel Tools and restarted Windows, Parallels, and my machine multiple times and I can't get Convergence or much of anything I depend on to work. I even did some registry cleanup and Windows diagnostics with no change. I also had several cursor issues and lockups. The Windows PVM file is huge and takes a long time to restore, but you can't use an updated PVM file with an older version.
I restored version 16 and the Windows PVM file from Time Machine from the day before the install of 17 and everything is working fine again.
 
Mac Pro 2010 Mojave.
Upgraded from Parallels Pro 16 to 17 and installed Parallels Tools
Startup is faster, however applications run slower
Cinebench GPU 653 cb > 594 cb
Cinebench OpenGL 46 FPS > 33 FPS
Novabench 1623 > 1413
CPU 968 > 924 GPU 201 > 187 Disk 223 > 83
I am really disappointed and waiting for an improvement.
Thanks for the downgrade link, Maria.
 
I am also suffering much the same. Windows 10 Pro guest OS that worked fine under Parallels Pro 16 is now very choppy and slow across the entire system under the new version 17, to the point where it's almost unusable. I have reverted to 16 and all is well again. I did not check other VM guest operating systems.
 
I wanted to go back to Parallels 16 Pro, but when I double click the old installer on my computer it says upgrade to 17.
The link that Maria posted is also to 17. I want 16. Please help.
 
FilipR said:
I wanted to go back to Parallels 16 Pro, but when I double click the old installer on my computer it says upgrade to 17.
The link that Maria posted is also to 17. I want 16. Please help.
Click to expand...
The box at the link that says Version 17 (Latest version) is a drop-down list. Click it and it reveals a list of older installers.
 
RobinK5 said:
I am also suffering much the same. Windows 10 Pro guest OS that worked fine under Parallels Pro 16 is now very choppy and slow across the entire system under the new version 17, to the point where it's almost unusable. I have reverted to 16 and all is well again. I did not check other VM guest operating systems.
Click to expand...
And to be clear, when I say "choppy and slow across the entire system" I mean that it's like this inside the VM. All operations within the Windows 10 guest OS are very slow and choppy; simple audio sounds break up and stutter; processes that would not normally hog the system are doing so. It's like all of sudden everything is running like it's on a old Pentium CPU. I have not chnaged any settings on the VM, simply upgraded from 16 to 17 (and now back to 16 because I can't be productive on 17 with the ways its performing).
 
An update on this issue. I decided to give version 17 another go. Again on booting the startup sound was stuttered and general performance was seen to be poor. But the, after playing around with a couple of settings (changing amount of RAM, switching Hypervisor from Parallels to Apple etc) with a few reboots of the VM in-between ... it's now all working at full speed with no issues!

Of course now I how no means of determining what the issue was nor if the changes I made contributed to "fixing" the problem. So maybe anyone else who is experiencing very poor performance with Windows 10 guest OS in Parallels 17, just give it time and it may magically all sort itself out.
 
I have the same problem with my windows 10, nothing was change except to upgrade to V17 thereafter mouse and keyboard oftentimes stuck and the booting time is now more than 2 minutes. I regret why i upgrade to V17. need some workaround to resolve this issue.
 
One (final?) update: I believe I've found root cause of severe slowdown. My VM had been set into what amounts to be Travel Mode. Without any interaction from me I may add. What spurred me into looking in more detail at the options was the fact that it kept putting my VM into Pause mode whenever I left the VM for another Mac app. It did this several times across several days, despite me repeatedly unchecking that option.

Options -> Startup and Shutdown -> was seen to be set to Pause Windows after 10 seconds
Options -> Optimization -> Resource usage was seen to be set to Low
Options -> Travel Mode was set to "When battery power is less than 30%"

The first two there at least were most definitely settings I had not altered at any time.

I reset Travel Mode to Never and Quit automatically to When connected to power
I unchecked Pause Windows after...
I reset Resource usage to No limit

All seems to be well again. Until tomorrow perhaps...
 
I'm seeing similar issues to above. Very slow/sluggish performance, especially around mouse input, where pointer movement is very laggy/sluggish. Sometimes Windows just displays a black screen and there's no way to resolve. Version 16 had none of these issues. Version 17 is a mess.
 
My biggest issue is with my Windows 10 VM when disconnecting or reconnecting my MBP16 to my LinkUp TB3 docking station that has an Apple TB display and a Samsung 4K monitor attached - it never remembers the monitor configuration correctlly. It almost always changes the MBP16 display resolution to something different (sometimes lower, sometimes higher?!?!?). Sometimes after disconnecting, it still incorrectly shows that the other 2 displays are there (in the VM, but not in Mac OS). Occasionally it changes the resolution of one of the other 2 displays, but this has been rare. PD16 used to occasionally get the monitor settings slightly confused - sometimes it thought there was a 4th display that didn't actually exist, which seemed to happen most often if the Samsung was asleep for a longer period of time and slow to wake up - but it was vastly more reliable than PD17 in this regard.

I also have choppy audio from the Win10 VM if I switch to one of my Mac Apps, putting Windows in the background. This never used to happen under PD16.
 
Hello,
I have issues with switching mouse to guest so I would like to try to reinstall parallels tools back to version 16, is it possible to share link where can be downloaded older versions of tools?

Thanks
 
I've noticed that the disk I/O is incredibly slow now on PD17 (it was fantastic in PD16). On another note, I switched to the Apple hypervisor sometime ago to save the fan life on my MacBook Pro - I find the fans don't run as hard and less heat is generated when using Apple's hypervisor. That said, while Apple supports nested virtualization, PD17 doesn't support it while Vmware does.

There is no reason why my Win10 VM should even be remotely sluggish on my machine IMHO.

MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019)
2.3 GHz Intel Core i9
64 GB DDR4 RAM
AMD Radeon Pro 5500M/8GB

I'm finding this incredibly frustrating with every new major version release. You (Parallels/Corel Corp), should really consider a insiders/beta public test group. I use Parallels mainly for coding in VS on Windows (& some games). I technically should know better by now, but seriously though, does it always have to be this much of a pain to upgrade to a new major version? If there is such a program, I'm unaware of it...
 
KristianS1 said:
Sometimes get crackling sound from VM audio after switching to host OS
Click to expand...
I always get stuttering sound when unfoccussing the Parallels-Window (Win10Pro-VM). It's reproducible every time:
  • In Win-VM: open sound control, eg via WIN+R -> control mmsys.cpl sound
  • double-click the only speaker -> extended tab -> click on button "Test"
  • quickly click outside the Parallels Window, eg into Mac Finder App
  • => stuttering output
I tried a lot of fixed posted here in the forum, but nothing helped:
  • Checked for Parallels Update - just happened today. My version is 17.0.1 (51482).
  • I changed the audio format in the sound control to 16bit.
  • I (re-)installed the Toolbox several times.
  • I (re-)installed and updated the audio driver.
  • To install the Parallels Audio driver I first had to open VM Config -> Hardware -> Audio & Camera -> extended -> Type = AC'97, reboot. As this did not help, I switched back to "HD Audio".
  • I checked VM Config -> Options -> Startup & Shutdown -> Settings are "Manually start and shutdown", "suspend after 30 secs", Clicking on Travel Mode shows both on "Never" = not switching on battery, nor when plugged-in.
Any ideas? I would appreciate any help. I am currently using this mostly for (a) gaming (Steam) and (b) skype for business scenarios, and the audio gets broken a lot during this time. The stuttering is easily reproducible when unfocussing, but it also stutters without focus change.
 
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