Workstation runs XP terribly slow under ubuntu, very slow hard drive access?

I have used parallels on my macbook for awhile now, and have had great success with it.

I recently installed parallels on my ubuntu 7.04 desktop, and after the manual prlnet.c tweaking (ridiculous that this is necessary to get it to run on a mainstream distro), got it up and running.

The problem is that it runs XP like a dog. I'm running on a sempron 2800 w/ 1 gig of ram, and a 500G sata 7200 RPM HD w/ 16 M cache. Not a screamer of a machine, but should be able to run XP decently (which it does natively, btw, when I dual boot to XP).

parallels-workstation almost never maxes out the CPU -- I have watched with top. No, what it does is sit there forever with the hard drive light on. It acts like it is taking FOREVER to access the hard drive. A lot of the time, the physical HD on my case is lit, but the HD indicator on parallels is not lit (this is with nothing else running on ubutu that would cause continuous hd access.) I have tried bumping the ram for the vm up to 600M, but still doesn't really help much. Also, I have installed parallels tools.

Has anyone else had similar problems, or better yet, does anyone else have any possible solutions. XP does *work* under parallels workstation, but it is basically unusable for real work. If this is the best parallels workstation can do, then it's not a very good product imho, even though the mac version is great.

 

Yeah I'm having the same issue I am running Feisty Fawn (7.04) with XP VM on Parallels. I have a Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0ghz CPU and 1Gig of Ram which runs XP and Ubuntu like nothing but for some reason with Parallels running its slow. Don't know whats causing the issue but I also noticed that the VM only see's one core. Not sure if its spliting the information between the two OS but if thats the case it should still be enough Juice to run the show.

I'm going to try a few more things but at the moment I am having mix reviews on Parallels even with the recommendation from Maximum PC. BTW I'm running an M5500i Alienware Laptop. If anyone knows any tricks feel free to share.

 

What does this command show?

I think you need to set this to turn on DMA:

Couple that this to get increased performance:

Other than that it is disk IO that's bogging down parallels. If this only occurs when you boot into windows under parallels, then it's the swapfile in windows that's bogging you down. Try configuring windows to use a fixed swap file instead of an expanding one. That should help some.

 

As long as my Parallels was still running ( see my thread Paralles freezes ), XP Performance was very fine ! ( Also Ubuntu FF 7.04 )