Parallels 8 Freeze OSX 10.8 Retina MBP

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DrSkywalker

Member
This has happened a couple of times now since the upgrade. Once a day so far. The Windows screen freezes (Mac fullscreen mode). Mouse and trackpad still work as far as moving the pointer around, but the computer becomes unresponsive. Waiting a long, long time, gave up and did a hard shutdown.

There is a pattern developing...
 
No problems so far with my retina machine. In my company we now and then experience that very problem with the Windows product (Parallels Workstation for Windows 6).

Is it possible for you to change to windowed mode (via keyboard shortcut) and end the task with CMD+ALT+ESC? Or are you completely frozen? If you can go back to the window mode, also have a look at the OS X activity monitor. Our windows machines show full usage of all assigned cores when the freeze happens suggesting something's going on within the VM.
 
I've had two freezes while in fullscreen mode in a week since I installed Parallels 8 - spinning beach ball and hard reboot required - yuck!
 
completely unresponsive - can't use pull down menu for CTRL-ALT-DEL, and of course the keyboard doesn't work. Not a Win 7 problem I suspect as it was running fine on PD7 with no hitches. Some kind of memory leak.
 
Thinking of the Windows machines again, we had two ideas:

Most of our Win machines are little bit older with Core2Duos (One core, two threats). We found that deactivating the adaptive hypervisor in the VM's configuration helped a lot for those weaker machines. But that's most likely not the cause for your problem:-)

On the other hand we tried a reinstall of the Parallels tools within the VM. I oversee more than 100 computers, and there is a trend of the tools not properly installed first time even if the installer had told you 'everything allright'.

Most weird things stopped after having deinstalled the tools completely, restart the VM, let Windows show it's 'new hardware' wizard without reacting to it and than install the tools from the scratch.

I'm not sure at all what goes wrong with the auto updater in the guest OS but (if you didn't already) give that a try.
 
Hmm, just to be sure - I'm not speaking about actions within the frozen guest. The display mode switcher short key is not processed to the VM but trapped by the PD mac application. Typing CTRL+CMD+F should bring back windows mode (as long the freeze is limited to the VM itself of course).
 
lnemo said:
Hmm, just to be sure - I'm not speaking about actions within the frozen guest. The display mode switcher short key is not processed to the VM but trapped by the PD mac application. Typing CTRL+CMD+F should bring back windows mode (as long the freeze is limited to the VM itself of course).
Click to expand...

When it happens again I'll give it a shot.
 
Inemo:
You were correct - CTRL-CMD-F brought back windowed mode and everything else moved along fine after that. What is the significance of this fact, and is it something Parallels should address?
 
DrSkywalker, can you find OS X kernel panic logs in Console? What is the offending module?
 
By the way, happened again at the end of the day yesterday. Had to hard shutdown the computer. I was flipping through a couple of apps but not doing anything special.
 
Great. Also tell them to watch for Full Screen idiosyncrasies. Instead of staying in Full Screen mode properly, while it SAYS it's full screen mode it will appear on the desktop and you can't reveal the desktop with the normal 4 finger swipe. You have to turn off full screen mode and re-enable it to get it acting properly.
Computer lockups are happening pretty much on a daily basis now. Seem to be related to longer use of the software but can't tell for sure.
 
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