How about an option (in preferences) that would automatically "Pause" the VM when the Parallels window is minimized ? (and automatically resume it when the window will be re-opened) ? That would give users a very quick and efficient way to pause/resume their VM. Congrats for your top product. Keep up the good work, Fred.
An even-more efficient way, IMHO, is to pause the VM on lost-focus. I would give both options, should be REALLY easy to implement.
Yes! Nice feature request. But pausing the VM in general, when minimizing the main window or when loosing focus is not always wanted. E.g. I start an IDE in the VM to compile a large project, change to the host OS to lookup sthg., I want the compiler to continue its job and not loosing some time. That's just a very simple example and I guess there are more reasons why Parallels should think about how to implement such an option. Perhaps as a switch (button) on the toolbar or as a checkbox in the properties of the current loaded file? I would not vote for a general option but a file based one.
What do you mean by 'Pause'? A running VM, that is doing nothing (minimized, in another workspace, not in focus), consumes practically no resources and holds it's current states while idle just like any computer when you walk away from it. The nice thing is that it instantly is useful when you return. Eventually, if the host OS needs it, some of the VM will be swapped out just like any other process running on the host. That is the best possible situation - let the host manage it's resources. If by 'Pause' you really mean 'Suspend', then you must be prepared to deal with the huge amount of resources being used during the suspend and resume. It will basically freeze your host machine for a few seconds going each way - try it.
Not true. If, for instance, I have several processes running in the guest system, the guest system could be stealing resources (CPU, disk usage) from the main OS, even when it's not needed. Moreover, even when the host machine is doing 'nothing', there is still an overhead for the VT technology: my 2.16ghz intel dual core is constantly using 8-12% of both cores whenever parallels is active, even if the guest os is doing nothing;. No, we mean pause. Suspend save the RAM state to the disk, as to be able to quit parallels and come back and restart from where you were: this is of course expensive to do, because suspending the guest OS and saving 512/768 MB of ram or more to disk is not cheap at all. What we mean is really a 'pause', as if the time freezes. The host os will see 14.01 time when we pause, then jump directly to 14.27 as soon as we 'play' the VM again. A pause will be instantaneous (no need to save anything) and will ASSURE that the guest VM is not competing for system resources with the main OS. VERY useful when I know I won't use the VM for a while, but don't want to go through the hassle of a suspend/resume
