I have been very happy with the latest version (4) of VM for WinXP on the Mac, with few problems. Today I installed VM Compactor, and at the point where it requires a restart, I get to the restarting WinXP logo screen for a few seconds and then a blue-screen-of-death crash. The system repeatedly tries to re-start itself, and the blue screen keeps recurring until I exit Parallels. I am running on an iMac. I tried restarting the Mac, but nothing changes. Any help you can suggest will be appreciated.
1. How much guest memory do you provide for your VM? 2. Please try to reduce VM acceleration level to "Normal" (power off the VM, click "Acceleration" link in the VM properties screen) 3. If it doesn't help, please send us a screenshot of the bluescreen.
Screenshot I've just had this happen to a user of mine, here's a screenshot. Also I have tried changing the amount of ram allocated to Parallels (512MB) and changing the acceleration to all three different levels to no avail. Safe mode will not work either.
I found out why this happened to my user, unfortunately this is one of the random shutdown MacBooks and a windows tech I spoke with said he had this problem happen to him with a Dell that had a faulty power supply and kept randomly shutting down. So, if you have a random shutdown MacBook or MacBook Pro and Windows inside of Parallels is running, this will happen. The Windows tech said the only way he got the Dell up and running again was to re-install Windows. Ugh.
