Windows 8.1 stutters, resolution does not fix itself

J

Joibisi

Bit poster
Hi!

Today I installed Windows 8.1.
I had Windows 8 installed as a virtual machine on my parallels 8 for a couple of months now and everything worked perfectly. After the upgrade today, windows suddenly stutters at the most basic tasks like opening the desktop or switching back to the tile menu.
Another strange thing is, the resolution of Windows does not optimize itself anymore like it did before the update. When I resize the window in which Windows is displayed it just gets scaled. When switching to fullscreen its just an upscaled version. I can however change the resolution in the system preferences of windows itself where the display is called "parallels vu".

Can somebody help me fix my problem? I need Windows to work but I do not have a portable Windows machine which was the reason I bought Parallels in the first place :(
 
Additional Info:

I just found out that the so called "dynamic resolution" is a feature of parallels tools.
I reinstalled it but it did NOT solve my problem. What it did was reenabling my network drive which actually is my mac osx harddrive folder. This feature was there before I upgraded to windows 8.1 and was gone after the upgrade. So I guess the tools software actually worked or lets say the installation worked but the stuttering and low frame performance is still there and no dynamic resolution works :(
 
Exactly the same issue here

Joibisi said:
Additional Info:

I just found out that the so called "dynamic resolution" is a feature of parallels tools.
I reinstalled it but it did NOT solve my problem. What it did was reenabling my network drive which actually is my mac osx harddrive folder. This feature was there before I upgraded to windows 8.1 and was gone after the upgrade. So I guess the tools software actually worked or lets say the installation worked but the stuttering and low frame performance is still there and no dynamic resolution works :(
Click to expand...
 
In you Windows VM press Cmd-R, type in "devmgmt.msc" without quotes and press enter, Device Manager window should appear. Expand Display adapters branch and generate a problem report via Parallels Help menu, post report ID here.
 
Report ID 29948353

Thanks in advance

serv said:
In you Windows VM press Cmd-R, type in "devmgmt.msc" without quotes and press enter, Device Manager window should appear. Expand Display adapters branch and generate a problem report via Parallels Help menu, post report ID here.
Click to expand...
 
I have the same issue, and if I try to uninstall Parallels Tools via Windows Control Panel Windows cannot start after the reboot.

I have a Mac Lion i7 2011 8gb ram / Windows 8.1
My Report ID is: 29950332
 
Farsear,

in your case the tools did not install properly (display driver is still Microsoft Basic one). It would make another attempt at tools installation: uninstall tools from Windows control panel, reboot Windows, install tools again.
 
patavinus,

How exactly Windows fails to start without tools? Does it show blue screen?
After all it's possible to update display driver manually. The downside is that if some other components of Parallels Tools are also misconfigured, you'll still need to reinstall.
To update display driver right-click on Microsoft Basic display and select Update Driver Software... from the menu. Then press "Browse my computer for driver software", then "Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer", then "Have disk..." button. Click "Browse..." button and navigate to C:\Program Files <or Program Files (x86) for 64-bit Windows>\Parallels\Parallels Tools\Drivers\prl_dd, then double click prl_dd.inf file and click OK. Then click Next and confirm driver installation.
 
Oh thanks, manually updating drivers solved the problem! The PC after the reboot said that cannot star windows and gave me the possibility to restore the system.
 
Hello,

I have the same problem — I tried removing the Parallels Tools and restarting Windows (to reinstall them afterwards), but Windows won't open my session anymore now.
It says:

"Your PC did not start correctly"
"Your PC ran into a problem and needs a restart"

and stuck in endless loop.

I can't return to a restore point, as I also get an error from Windows.
Tried to scan & fix errors but does not work either.

I'll try to figure something out, but I don't recommend uninstalling the Parallel Tools!

Cheers,
 
Report ID 29960043
I have 1/2 GB of video memory allocated to the VM, but can only get 1920x1200 resolution with the "Parallels Vu" adapter. Making the window larger (on my 30" monitor) just interpolates, but does not increase the resolution. I did reinstall Parallels Tools (it claimed successfully), but the manual reinstall suggested by serv seemed to change the display adaptor, and fixed it.
 
serv said:
patavinus,

How exactly Windows fails to start without tools? Does it show blue screen?
After all it's possible to update display driver manually. The downside is that if some other components of Parallels Tools are also misconfigured, you'll still need to reinstall.
To update display driver right-click on Microsoft Basic display and select Update Driver Software... from the menu. Then press "Browse my computer for driver software", then "Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer", then "Have disk..." button. Click "Browse..." button and navigate to C:\Program Files <or Program Files (x86) for 64-bit Windows>\Parallels\Parallels Tools\Drivers\prl_dd, then double click prl_dd.inf file and click OK. Then click Next and confirm driver installation.
Click to expand...

After several Parallels Tools install attempts, I still did not have the Parallels Adapter
installed. Also, the uninstall of Parallels tools also caused Win8.1 to not boot and
go into the troubleshoot mode and only a restore back to the point before the
uninstall of Parallels Tools would allow it to reboot.

With that said, after following your manual install instructions of the video adapter
after installing the updated Parallels tools resulted in the Parallels video getting
installed and I now have my full 2560x1440 full screen on my Thunderbolt display
instead of the ugly 1920x1200 of the default Windows adapter.

Thank you very much!
 
serv said:
patavinus,

How exactly Windows fails to start without tools? Does it show blue screen?
After all it's possible to update display driver manually. The downside is that if some other components of Parallels Tools are also misconfigured, you'll still need to reinstall.
To update display driver right-click on Microsoft Basic display and select Update Driver Software... from the menu. Then press "Browse my computer for driver software", then "Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer", then "Have disk..." button. Click "Browse..." button and navigate to C:\Program Files <or Program Files (x86) for 64-bit Windows>\Parallels\Parallels Tools\Drivers\prl_dd, then double click prl_dd.inf file and click OK. Then click Next and confirm driver installation.
Click to expand...


Hi again!
When I cam home from work today I saw your replies and tried them out from the top to the bottom. After uninstalling parallels tools I had the same problems like everybody else. My Windows 8.1 booted to a blue screen saying it had problems and rebootet over and over again. After a while the message about repairing the os appeared which did not change a thing so I had the option as described to return to a point before uninstalling parallels tools.
I followed the instructions quoted above and it solved my problem.
A frustrating experience but with your help it solved the problem and my 8.1 works!
Thank you SO much for responding quickly and solving the issue as I sadly need a windows work evoirment for my job.

Kind regards from Austria :)
 
JoelRubio said:
I'd like to go to Win 8.1 today, too. But I'm also still on P8. This all sounds scary. So maybe we need to go P9 first?
Click to expand...

For me Windows 8.1 works fine in Parallels 8.
Only the Display driver has to be reinstalled with the method above when you reinstalled Parallels Tools.
 
I had the same issue, and fixed it by reinstalling the display driver (after reinstalling Parallels Tools a few times).

But now, when i'm in Coherence and click the start-button in my mac-dock to launch startmenu (Start8), i cannot start any programs or explorer-windows. The startmenu opens, but doesn't response on any actions. Is it a problem of start8? There was an update yesterday, too.

Help would be great!

ID: 29981051
 
Last edited:
I had this issue too and fixed it by updating the driver for the graphics card as described above. But, I ran into another problem: When I set "Use all displays in full screen" and use 2 monitors in full screen, the mouse pointer position is "calculated wrong", so that the mouse is pointing 1/2 the length from the left end of the left monitor. If I use 3 monitors, the mouse pointer position is 1/3 of the length from the left end of the left monitor. This only happens in full screen mode, if I stretch the VM window over all screens it works perfectly.

EDIT: I found the solution to this problem. It was basically the same problem as with the Graphics adapter. It was the mouse drivers that had been reset to windows defaults. I updated them all (both PS/2 and HID mouses) with the drivers in the C:\Program Files <or Program Files (x86) for 64-bit Windows>\Parallels\Parallels Tools\Drivers\prl_mouf folder and then it worked perfectly.
 
Last edited:
FWIW, I got around to updating my Bootcamp install of Windows8 to 8.1 on my 2011, 13", 2.7GHz, MBP.
The Bootcamp upgrade went fine after 4 reboots (why, why soooooooo many). Then opened the install
up in the previously setup VM for Win8. Got a boot drive missing error. Shut down VM and ran a
Repair Disk via Disk Utility on the drive and VM then booted just fine.

However with this configuration, the Parallels Video card install was untouched and active as opposed
to my previous experience as previously posted with a strictly Win8 VM that required a manual reinstall
of the driver.

I thought I would add this extra bit of info.
 
I had a same issue. fixed it installing drivers manually as stated above. However, windows 8.1 keeps saying you have a issue regarding virtual machine if I click the flag icon on the menu bar. Using P9 on rMBP 13 early 2013. It looks like parallels tools have some problems on windows 8.1. IE11 very slow after updating to Windows 8.1 as well. Please fix this issue ASAP. Paying $50 every year for these? Unacceptable. Its more than OSX.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top