Spinning Beach Ball

I purchased Parallels 7 and Windows to run Quicken 2012 about two weeks ago. As of now I’m using OS 10.6.8 and expect to upgrade to LION.

Below is my experien so far.

1. My 27 inch iMac 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3
2. The iMac has slowed down to a crawl.
2. At times there is no response to keyboard input.
3. Spining beach ball is common.
4. As of now it is essentially useless.

 

The computer is likely paging, not enough free memory (you can check this via Activity Monitor.app).
The total amount of physical RAM has to be shared between OS X and Windows.
You have 4 GB RAM, don't assign more than 2 GB to the VM, in fact, I recommend 1 GB only. Of course, the apps you run on the OS X side, at the same time, have influence on free memory, in particular, browsers, for instance, Safari can easily eat up 1 GB RAM.

 

Thanks for your quick reply and advice. Now I need further assistance, how do I assign RAM to an application?

Once again thanks.

 

You can only assign the total amount of RAM for the Virtual Machine as a whole, there's no way, I know off, to limit the memory usage of an application running in either OSX or Windows, that's a job for the Operating System, to dynamically manage available RAM.