After upgrade to v4, XP Pro extremely slow

Anybody found a reliable fix for PD 4.0's snail pace?

I have now experienced the extremely slow PD 4.0 issue. It seems to coincide with my manual install of Parallels Tools, but MS also released a Windows update the other day. I have tried all of the suggested fixes in this thread and still cannot see an increase in speed. This reminds me of trying to run XP on an old 256 MHz processor machine. Funny thing is that the Mac side is largely unaffected. This upgrade has been the worst experience of any upgrade in my twenty years of computing, but I now have several new friends in India on the Parallels support team.

My configuration:

MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz Duo
4 Gb of RAM
OS 10.5.6
PD 4.0 with Windows XP Pro
2508 Mb RAM dedicated to PD4.0

Adjusting the # of CPU's made no difference nor did allocating more RAM to PD4.0, and when I ran the disk utility there was no affect. Turning off sharing yielded a slight improvement, but what's the point of having 4.0 when 3.0 was faster, and I could file share with more ease. I agree with one of the previous posts that this Official upgrade is more like a beta. I should not have disobeyed my prime rule- "NEVER EVER INSTALL SOFTWARE WITH THE TAG x.0" - wait for x.1 or x.2, unless you like being a beta tester.
 
1. Set memory for Virtual Machine to less than 1 GB if Windows XP and more than 1 Gb if is windows Vista
2. Perform Mac and Windows side disk defragmentation http://www.xvsxp.com/system/system_tools_defrag.php
3. Disable Themes in Windows serives.msc stop Themes service
4. If you are running in Coherence, try to switch to Single Window, or lower Mac resolution
5. Do not run more than one antivirus
6. Some antivirus software can load CPU when Heuristic Prediction is set, or Tamper protection (Symantec, MacAffey), adjust settings to risk you are supposed, high security settings is not always good idea, as it can also affect software running - this is very important step
7. Run msconfig , and disable unneeded startup items
See http://www.netsquirrel.com/msconfig/msconfig_xp.html
8. Optimize computer experience for best performance, it is for My Computer Properties - Advanced - Performance
9. Make sure that at least 1.25 GB of Memory is free for Mac OS (it is Total Memory - Virtual Machine Memory)
10. Make sure that at least 2 GB +Virtual Machine assigned memory *2 is available on Mac OS partition where VM is located


Please also follow steps in http://kb.parallels.com/en/5859
 
Followed the directions to a "T"... no change

Thanks for the recommendations John. I performed ever step you recommended and still do not see an improvement in PD 4.0 speed. It still takes a great deal of time to open programs. Could this be due to Parallels Tools? Any other suggestions before I go back to PD 3.0?
 
I'm in the same boat as you. When you boot to safe mode or vga mode, or hit F8 during boot and stay on that screen, does your CPUs spike to 100%?
 
Yes claco, it spikes to 100%. I am currently re-installing Parallels Tools per the suggestion of someone in support... will let you know.
 
3 Ticket reports for Snail Pace and lock up of XP v4

Last Ticket 24455

I have made 3 reports over the last 3 weeks
I have tried all the fixes posted. None work.
I have checked daily for V4 update NONE

I do not use Bootcamp
Base iMac 2.4 1 gig.
I was about to buy more memory but V4 does not care it is equally slow
with 4 gig

Unless you can come up with something new I will either go back to V3

I upgraded to V4 because YOU said it was faster

Steve Baker
 
I figured out the problem to PD 4.0 snail pace

Once I uninstalled Parallels Tools then Parallels Desktop 4.0 works as it should, but I cannot re-install Tools using the "Install Parallels Tools" command from the Virtual Machine pull down menu. I suspect, as others have, that it is an issue with Sharing, and I am going to try to find a work around.
 
The suggestion early in this thread to disable the Kaspersky protection may be a good one if you haven't tried it. That was the cause of the slowness problems I had after installation. Turning it off was a quick fix, wish I had found it earlier but by thinking through what was new since v3 Kaspersky quickly became a leading suspect.
 
same problem, after upgrade to 4.0 extremely slow

I've the same problem on a couple of macs (different models, iMacs, MacBooks). After upgrading to Parallels Desktop 4.0, the emulation works extremely slow. I've checked different settings, but it would not be better. What can i do now?
 
Slooooooooooooow

Hi guys,
happy to discover that I'm not the only one experiencing bad performance with PDv4.

I'm having issues both with a Mini 2Duo 1.66Ghz with 2GB ram and a MB Pro 2Duo 2.33Ghz/2GB RAM.
The performance is REALLY poor comparing to PDv3.
I've found that reducing the VCPU number to 1 improves performance a lot.

Will there be any fix for this issues?!? I was expecting the new version to be faster than the old one!

Bye,
Andrea
 
I've fought the same slowdown over and over.

Once running Defrag helped bring the speed back up ... when it happened to you, did it bog the Mac down as well?
 
Another thing to look at in XP is to turn off the Indexing Service for the 'C' drive.
(right-click C then select Properties to find it)
 
Screenshot of issues

I send this to RT with my latest ticket report. In case they get ditched in email, I'll leave them hear as well.

To recap, the problem I'm seeing is that booting XP has more than triple in time taken, even just sitting at the boot options screen (F8), or botting into safe mode/vga mode hogs the CPU on the host machine, even while the cpu in the guest is loafing. Since this happens during the xp boot screen, presumably when agp440 is loaded, I surmise this is same reason boot times have gone out the window.
 

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When all else fails...

I got nailed between the eyes back in the PD3 days and had to start from scratch.
It was a PAIN - but in the end, the only way to get it all right. Have had NO problems since!

What I did - (I know some of this is likely covered in various KB articles but here goes):

Trash the old VM (backing up needed files first if possible)
(If using XP - one should back up the Windows activation files too; will explain how if asked via PM; it's a bit involved)

Uninstall Parallels completely (using the uninstaller on the CD or .dmg then hunt down and delete the remnants)

Run Disk Utility (permissions, disk integrity), make sure OS X is up to date, then do a cold restart (shut down / power up)

THEN reinstall Parallels 4, activate it, create a new VM, and install Parallels Tools into Windows
(If running XP - restore the copied Windows activation files BEFORE activating Windows)

At this point you should have a fully functional Windows VM - the last step is to reinstall the apps you needed.
Again, if you've tried pretty much everything else, it's a pain but once you get PD4 running OK, it WILL be worth it.
As for security software, I have had no issues when using Windows' default firewall and the free version of AVG.
 
In claco's case I guess, CPU is not recognized , or is not updated,
Also I think that performing command bellow will help
in Terminal when Parallels Desktop is not running

cd Documents
rm -rf .parallels-vm-directory
 
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