Windows XP tells me to press ctrl+alt+del to log in. It seems that when I hit ANY key on the keyboard, windows simply freezes up. This is a really weird one, and I haven't seen any other mention of it. Does anybody have any suggestions here? Thanks in advance.
That is odd. Try using the menu to issue Ctrl-Alt-Del and let us know what happens next. (VM -> Send Keys -> Ctrl + Alt + Del)
Yeah, that too... any way I press keys, it just hangs... and spikes approximately one cpu (of my two). Very, very weird, I know...
You might make it easier to help you if you post your exact configuration. Which Mac, how much memory, disk free space, VM configuration -- memory allocation, virtual disk size, any other settings you changed from the defaults, and anything else you think may be helpful. In most cases, F8 works fine except on laptops whence fn-F8 is sometimes required. You seem to have something else going on.
This is a 15" MBP with the 2.16GHz procs and 2G ram. There's also plenty of space left on the 100Gb drive. We've used a prepared image that my company uses to load windows on all their new pc's... so it's possible something inside that is messing it up. It's also worthwhile to note that everything appeared to be working fine until we installed the parallels tools and rebooted. I tried hitting a key (just a letter) while dragging the "press ctrl+alt+del window" around. The VM stalls up solid, with the wire frame of the window being moved still there. Based on this, it seems like a parallels issue to me...
How much RAM have you assigned to the VM (Windows)? Have you changed any of the VM defaults? How big is your virtual disk? Using Win2k here, the sweet spot in performance on a 2 GB MacBook seems to be around 768meg RAM for the VM. I get good VM performance and reasonable OSX performance. Much greater or much less, I see all sorts of problems, mostly speed, but I suspect that way out at the ends things will start to fail. XP might be even more RAM sensitive. And as an experiment, how much effort would it be to create a new VM and try again? Then if that doesn't work, maybe you can find out what the company image has installed besides XP that might be causing a problem. (Anti virus, firewall, etc.) and disable them after you install the image but before you install Parallesl tools. Don't you hate it when it works for others and not for you? Drives me nuts.
I've allocated 512M for winxp... I think the next thing we're gonna try is a fresh winxp install and tailor it from there. It would have been nice to just use this image, but oh well... I'll try and come back to the thread and post what I find.
Almost forgot to revisit the forum... But yeah, we reinstalled winxp from scratch and loaded up the necessary software... seems to be working fine now.
