I installed the demo version of Parallels Desktop for Mac a day or two ago. Since I already had a 20G partition set up for Windows XP via Boot Camp, I set up a VM for that and let Parallels do its installation. I originally gave 512M for Windows XP. The first couple times I tried to run XP, I crashed it by trying to run Coherence. I stumbled across these forums by accident when searching for the problem on Google (as far as I can tell, there are no links to this forum on the Parallels Support page) and saw the thread about ZoneAlarm causing problems with Coherence. Okay, scratch one feature. While slow, the XP VM did work at first. (I have used Windows for many years, and am aware that Windows is a memory hog.) However, something would always manage to crash the VM. Running simple things like Internet Explorer would crash the VM, sometimes with an error message from Parallels (Fatal error) and sometimes from Mac OS X (Parallels has closed, but OS X was not affected.) Yesterday I was running Remote Web Workplace through IE7, which seemed to run fine until I logged out. The VM froze and I got "Parallels has closed unexpectedly" or words to that effect. Typically when the VM closes improperly, attempting to rerun Parallels would give me an error "Cannot find image Boot Camp!" In the few days since the initial install, I don't think it has shut down normally - it has ALWAYS crashed. When it does, I have to go into Disk Utility and manually remount the Windows partition, but even after doing this the "Cannot find image Boot Camp" message would still come up. Trying 2 or 3 more times would eventually bring it back up. The main reason I even tried Parallels is because I still need to run QuickBooks Pro under Windows and I got tired of having to reboot. Given the awful performance of Parallels so far, I'm scared to run QuickBooks in it, for fear of the VM crashing and eating my data file. Today I increased the amount of RAM for XP up to 1G. The VM window started, but the entire startup screen was not there - only the lower left corner was visible in the VM window. I had set the Windows video resolution to 1280x1024 at some point, but since the VM crashes almost every time, I thought perhaps the display settings got corrupted. Once Windows loaded, I clicked the "Full Screen" button hoping that would reset the video. The VM window went away, but never came back up in full screen. Instead, the menu bar on the top of my Mac desktop went away, then so did my mounted drives and shortcuts. I waited 5 minutes. Nothing changed, so I selected the Parallels desktop from the task bar and tried to Open it. At this point, everything went into slow motion. A second Parallels icon opened, but it was not selectable. It would take 5-10 seconds for anything to respond to a mouse click. I had a few applications visible, and they worked okay, but every time I tried to Close Parallels it would either do nothing or give me a partial window about "the VM is running, shut down properly, blah blah." The bottom of this window was chopped off through the center of the line that said "Do not show this again", so the buttons were not selectable. (ESC got rid of it.) After about 10 more minutes of this, I hit the power button. When OS X rebooted, my startup programs did not automatically run. I had to reselect Open at Login for several apps. Everything else seems okay, but I am really afraid to run Parallels again. I see references to beta versions of Parallels Desktop. I downloaded version 3188; is there is a later version that solves these problems? At this point I am still running a demo version, as there has been no incentive at all for me to pay $80 for a product that does not do what it claims. Am I SOL?
Sorry to hear that you have so much problems. 3188 is the latest version and I have been using it for a few months now. Although it is not bug free, I find it to be quite stable. I have been running XP VM with Boot Camp, Vista Ultimate, Fedora 6, OpenSUSE 10.2, ubuntu 6.1, Trixbox 2.0, and OpenFiler 2.2 without much trouble. I also run Quicken in the XP VM without any problem. So I think there must be something else wrong in your case. I would suggest the followings: 1. Do a memory test. I suggest you download MemTest. It is free and does a good job. I have seen so many problems caused by bad memory in my company. Sometimes, bad memory can also cause file corruption. 2. Boot into Boot Camp and do a disk check in XP to make sure the file system is intact. 3. Make sure you have at least 3-4G free disk space in the Boot Camp partition. XP needs that much to run or you will experience random problems. 4. Disable or remove unnessary startup services and applications. Also uninstall any beta drivers. 5. Make sure the Parallels Tools installed has the same build number as your Parallels Desktop. If not, reinstall Parallels Tools. 6. Make sure you have the latest Boot Camp drivers installed. The latest version is 1.2. 7. Make sure you have all the latest XP updates installed. Good luck.
I'll do that right now. The RAM came with the laptop, I did not install it later. XP ran a disk check one of the times it was starting up in a VM. It mentioned fixing some indexes in an unnamed file, but since then no problems have been found. There is 10.7G free at the moment on that partition. I hear ya on the space thing - I have worked with Windows systems since Windows /386; some things don't change. I never really had a lot of stuff installed on Windows XP anyway, since I don't use it too often. I did remove Skype from startup when I set up the VM since I don't need it running in two places at once. Right now it loads the Quicktime and WinAmp agents, RoboForm (a password manager for IE) ZoneAlarm, the Bluetooth agent, Parallels Tools, and the HP Digital Imaging monitor. The drivers are from Boot Camp back in November, not sure what version that was. I did download 1.2 hoping it would fix the clock sync problem, but when someone on the Apple Support forum said it was still broken, I didn't update. Guess it's time to do that. Just tried to load Windows to check, and it gave me the "Unable to load disk image Boot Camp!" error. Clicking Start Virtual Machine worked the second time. Parallels Tools reports Build 3188. Yep, it's set to auto-update, and it did download a few things last time I ran XP. I also got a tip in another thread - reducing the VM RAM to 512 did make it more stable. Thanks for the help. -Z
