What are the specs of your machine? and VM setting? I installed XP Pro SP2, All Windows Updates, Office Pro 2003, One Note 2003 & Visio 2003 plus all the office updates in about 2 hours. This was also from an ISO which was not stored on the same physical drive as the VM HDD. 2.0Ghz iMac 20" 2Gb Ram 256Mb GPU My VM had the following: VT Turned On 512Mb Ram 10240Mb Hard Disk - Expanding No USB Sound Net Bridged to EN1
Please check your memory configuration and post it here please: 1. Amount of RAM in your Mac. 2. "Reserved memory limit" value in menu Edit->Preferences->Memory. 3. Memory amount in VM configuration.
Is the ISO image on the same physical disk as your VM's hard disk image? What Intel Mac? Is it a mini with a 5400 rpm hard disk?
interinv, The reason I ask the location of these files is that if both the ISO and the HDD images are on the same physical disk it will take about twice as long to install, combine that with a slow disk like the ones in a Mac mini or MacBook and you add even more time to the install.
interinv, i think there is something wrong with your configuration 1) Make sure you really have 1GB of RAM in your OSX 2) Go Edit->Preferences->Memory and set Reserved memory limit = 512 MB 3) Set 256 MB of memory for your guest in it's configuration Plese, post your results here.
1) i really have 1 GB ram 2) when i trying to set reserved memory higher than 96 mb, Parallels answers: Invalid memory size is specified. Please specify an integer value between 96 and 96 MB. May be this is beta restriction?
The problem is here. Parallels reserved memory for all VMs is JUST 96M. And actual memory used by guest XP is 496 - so all the time you have very intensive swapping! On 1G Mac you should be able to have at list 600-700M reserved for all VMs (and this value should be set by default after Parallels installation). So we have to understand why your value is stuck to 96M - this is the reason of problems.
