I recently purchased Parrallels Desktop for Mac. I've been reading the quick start guide and I also did a search on the web. I am a little worried since I have read soo many people having problems. So I am here hopefully to have none or minimize any potential problems. My question is should I be doing a typical or custom install? I came across a link where one chose custom and they were able to customize ram and file size where in typical it seems you can't. What do you think? Also...is there any recommended posts I should read first or sites I should visit before beginning with the install? Thanks for your help in advance!
I would recommend you start with "typical" and only change it if you see a problem. I guess an exception might be if you know in advance you will need a virtual hard drive bigger than 8GB. Ram works pretty good with the default recommendations...an exception might be if you had a huge MAC Pro with huge amounts of RAM. A key thing to remember is that your VM runs as a guest under OSX. If you give too much of the memory resources to the VM, it starves OSX, and that net result is a slow, unsatisfactory VM. The default parameters usually get this balance just about right for me.
I would suggest boosting the HD size a bit... 8 GB is just a little too skimpy for most uses... But, that is just me. If you have a 'typical' set-up, and you want the 'fastest speed possible', you probably have 2 GB of RAM (never use Parallels with less), so allocate ~768MB to Parallels, you will have to play with it to find the ideal numbers.
