Yosemite 10.10.3 host and guest OS - guest display is very low resolution

[Parallels User]

The guest is displaying at 1024px by 768px or close. Accessing Display settings provides no other options. Control Center provides no options except Options->FullScreen. I've tried most permutations and none allow displaying the guest OS screen higher than 1024px.

Also, during experimentation, I set FullScreen Scale to fit screen: Off and restarting the OS it froze on login. I cannot get it to go past log in. I will likely have to kill the guest OS since I can find no way to shut it down, only remove.

And of course all the settings are grayed out in control Center since the guest OS is running (frozen at log in).

Not real happy with this so far. Anyone have a suggestion? BTW before you flame me for posting this because it's a common post, understand that I searched the site and read through many threads but none of them touch on my particular issue.

Erik

 

[Parallels User]

OK, I was able to Stop the VM and change Full Screen Scale setting so it doesn't freeze. But the resolution is dismal. This is a 2015 Mac Pro capable of true 4K display resolution. I would expect at least retina resolution as a configurable display option.

 

[Dhruba@Parallels]

Hi ErikT1,
Please try re-installing Parallels Tools, refer http://kb.parallels.com/4841 and check how it works.
And regarding the screen resolution, Windows and other operating systems are not adapted for such high pixel density. Parallels Desktop provides enhanced Retina display support for Windows 7 and Windows 8 virtual machines.
In the Mac menu go to Actions (the Virtual Machine menu in older versions of Parallels Desktop) -> Configure... -> Hardware ->Video to see Resolution options for your virtual machine.
For more information, refer http://kb.parallels.com/114700

 

[Parallels User]

Hi ErikT1,
Please try re-installing Parallels Tools, refer http://kb.parallels.com/4841 and check how it works.
And regarding the screen resolution, Windows and other operating systems are not adapted for such high pixel density. Parallels Desktop provides enhanced Retina display support for Windows 7 and Windows 8 virtual machines.
In the Mac menu go to Actions (the Virtual Machine menu in older versions of Parallels Desktop) -> Configure... -> Hardware ->Video to see Resolution options for your virtual machine.
For more information, refer http://kb.parallels.com/114700

Thanks,
Dhruba

Follow Parallels Support on Twitter: @ParallelsCares

Thanks, Dhruba, but your instructions didn't work. I did reinstall the Parallel tools, and rebooted the VM, and went in through the Configure... menu option (it's no longer under Actions in Parallels 10 see one of the screen shots), and going to Hardware->Video options shows only Video memory settings. See the attached screen shot to note there is NO resolution options on that page.

Still blocked from using Parallels. Thanks again for your help in getting this resolved.

Erik

 

[Parallels User]

OK, my bad. D'oh!

The solution was staring me in the face. The video memory setting controls how much resolution I can get. I gave it 64 MB and now have 2048 x 1536. A note about this in some up-front setup instructions would be helpful since I searched quite a lot before I stumbled on this, though now I see how simple it was. Anyway, looks like Parallels will do it for me after all.

You can close this as solved.

Erik