Parallels Desktop 9 for Mac: Nightmare

R

rikinva

Bit poster
Long-time Mac and Parallels user here. Running a 27" iMac (late 2009 version) with Mavericks 10.9.2. I have never had a problem with running Windows in any version of Parallels until now. I was even doing fine with Parallels 9 for months... and then I installed the upgrade to get me from Mavericks 10.9.1 to 10.9.2, and all hell broke loose. The first problem I noticed was any program I ran in Windows slowed to a crawl. It was ridiculous -- simply selecting an operation that should have taken a few seconds was taking a couple of minutes, and I couldn't shake the ever-spinning ball. I tried uninstalling Windows and Parallels 9, then doing a full reinstall. I even tried booting up into the Recovery Console to perform a full reinstall of Mavericks. All to no avail. Within a day or two, my hard drive became corrupt, and I once again had to boot to Recovery Console to try to repair the drive. Unfortunately the drive was unrepairable -- even Disk Warrior would not repair the disk -too much wrong with it. And I was unable to format the drive and start over with a clean install. I took my computer into the Apple tech folks and they replaced my hard drive. All diagnostic tests they ran on the computer indicated it was a good, healthy system. I thought I was now back in business, so I reinstalled Mavericks -- then started the tedious process of reinstalling everything. The same thing happened again when I installed Parallels with Windows 7 - Windows seemed fine for a very short time, then started running really slow, and my brand new hard drive became corrupt again. This time, however, I was able to reformat and start over with the same hard drive. The third time of rebuilding my iMac -I encountered the same scenario, even down to needing to repair hard drive corruption. I am very lucky - this time, I was able to repair the hard drive. But... this time I uninstalled Parallels 9. I am no longer running Parallels on my iMac desktop. I am afraid to take the chance. Oddly... Parallels 9 runs perfectly on my MacBook Air (late 2010 version). No problems there at all. But my iMac seems to be cursed. Just wanted to share my hellish experience -- has anyone else experienced nightmares like this?
 
I'm sorry, but I am not willing to deliberately crash my iMac again so that I can produce a problem report for you. I have already wiped out and rebuilt my hard drive three times, and I am not willing to do it again. For what its worth, I obtained the same kind of slow-down and sluggish Windows behavior when I tried VMWare Fusion running Windows 7. As a result of all these experiences, I have worked hard to eliminate my need for Windows so that I don't have to run a virtual machine anymore. For now, my iMac is running just fine, but to be honest, I am not altogether convinced there is not something more sinister going on deep in the boards and hardware of my iMac. Time will tell.
 
I took your advice and ran the Apple hardware test. Thanks for providing the link to this article. I did not know about this diagnostic. I ran the hardware test, and it confirmed I have a hardware problem -- I received an error message: 4MEM/9/400000000. After digging around on the internet, the general consensus across the board seemed to be that the problem was bad RAM memory. I ran the test numerous times to make sure I got consistent results. I did. So I systematically began playing "musical chairs" with my memory, in order to test the integrity of each memory module using the AHT. It worked -- I finally found a memory configuration that allowed all the hardware tests to run to completion with no problems. It meant dropping from 16GB to 8GB, but at least the problem memory is gone. I feel much better now. But I am a little miffed at the Apple certified tech guys who worked on my iMac previously. They should have run the AHT to rule out hardware problems when my brand new hard drive became corrupted. Obviously, they didn't. Anyway... I'm up and running and feeling confident about re-installing Parallels Desktop 9 with Windows 7. I'm sorry to have disparaged Parallels when the problem actually turned out to be something entirely different. Thanks for the help.
 
I'm sorry to report impossibly slow Paralles 9/ Win 7 as well.
8 Gigs of RAM
Problem seems to be related to the VR process, that hogs 50% of CPU power before launching any windows application.
 
rikinva said:
I took your advice and ran the Apple hardware test. Thanks for providing the link to this article. I did not know about this diagnostic. I ran the hardware test, and it confirmed I have a hardware problem -- I received an error message: 4MEM/9/400000000. After digging around on the internet, the general consensus across the board seemed to be that the problem was bad RAM memory. I ran the test numerous times to make sure I got consistent results. I did. So I systematically began playing "musical chairs" with my memory, in order to test the integrity of each memory module using the AHT. It worked -- I finally found a memory configuration that allowed all the hardware tests to run to completion with no problems. It meant dropping from 16GB to 8GB, but at least the problem memory is gone. I feel much better now. But I am a little miffed at the Apple certified tech guys who worked on my iMac previously. They should have run the AHT to rule out hardware problems when my brand new hard drive became corrupted. Obviously, they didn't. Anyway... I'm up and running and feeling confident about re-installing Parallels Desktop 9 with Windows 7. I'm sorry to have disparaged Parallels when the problem actually turned out to be something entirely different. Thanks for the help.
Click to expand...

Glad I could help, I was in fact convince it was bad RAM when I read your problem and it turned out to be true.
 
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