I finally had a chance to revisit Parallels today, after my brief dive into the new beta last week. At that point, I’d complained that I couldn’t get the coherence mode to work, and I had a handful of other little gripes. One of my astute readers asked if I’d installed the Parallels Tools. I thought I had, given that I’d installed them on Boot Camp before launching Parallels, but it turns out that there are two separate sets of Parallels Tools, the second of which are installed from inside Parallels Desktop (Actions -> Install Parallels Tools…). So this afternoon, when I had some spare time, I fired those up, and restarted my Virtual Machine.
Me = blown away.
If it wasn’t for the fact that Parallels chugs my processor power like nobody’s business (on my Core Duo 2.0Ghz MacBook, it uses on average, the equivalent of one core) as well as eating up a decent chunk of my RAM, I’d have this sucker running all the time. The only downside, at the moment, is that since I’m using the Boot Camp partition for Parallels as well, you cannot suspend it (probably because it has to access the actual disk).
Coherence adds not only the ability run Windows apps like they’re Mac apps, but it also lets you drag and drop files between Windows and Mac apps. The ability to run XP and OS X in separate virtual desktops is cool, but Coherence makes that look kludgy. I was shocked and amazed to find that my two-finger scrolling worked perfectly in Firefox running in Coherence mode.
A few small gripes remain: Exposé and command-tab don’t let you pick out individual windows, but I’d imagine that’s pretty time consuming. Also, trying to login to my VPN via either Parallels or OS X failed, but I may just need to play around with that some more. Also, having the Windows taskbar hanging around just above the dock was annoying, but moving it up to the top of the screen and setting it to auto-hide tucks it neatly under OS X’s menubar unless called for.
All in all, Parallels has really delivered on a product that for once really makes me feel like I’m living in the future. When I one day get my eight-core Mac Pro with eight gigs of RAM, I’m going to be all about this sucker. Still, it’s getting me thinking that I need to pop a second gig of RAM into my MacBook stat.
indeed, parallels fairly screams on my 2.0 macbook with 2gb RAM. Of course, the fan's running pretty much all the time, but it's a small price to pay for convergence :)
Your install of Parallels is eating up quite a bit of system resources. Doesn't sound normal if it's using up that much processing power (equivalent of one core)? I can run Parallels on end on a 2.0 Ghz MBP with 2GB of ram and the usage never jumps as high as what your describing. Maybe the utility uses more processing power while running off of Boot Camp?
coherence and everything seems to work fine for me, but the problem is I cannot run windows from my Boot Camp drive.
I installed parallels tools by booting natively into the boot camp partition and doing the installation. But whenever I tried to access the partition from Parallels, it say "Unable to open disk image Boot Camp!"
Is there a step I missed? my boot camp partition is formatted as FAT32 not NTFS.
Parallels runs fairly comfortably in 2GB of RAM on my MacBook Pro (Core Duo 2.16GHz). The extra RAM is essential. I gave a Windows XP installation 384MB of RAM and I can run it without slowing down my regular work.
Get the extra RAM for sure.
Your comment about feeling like you're living in the future is spot on. When I have Windows XP and Kubuntu running simultaneously on top of OS X and I'm doing website/browser testing in all three OSes without having to slide over to another machine, it's impressively convenient. Parallels is truly a “killer app” that by itself justifies the entire Mac to Intel transition.
I have been running Parallels for the last 4 months on a 2Ghz MBP, w 2GB of RAM. I have 512MB assigned to my Parallels XP session. Including the latest beta since it was released. I am currently running XP from a full VM and not from my Bootcamp partition.
Your experiences with CPU load do not mirror mine. My typical CPU usage has been around 8 - 10% of one core. I spend a lot of time in Outlook, Word, and terminal services client, as well as other Windows admin tools.
I have used the Cisco IPSEC and SSLVPN clients from within my Parallels XP session without any issues from both wired and wireless connections.
I will agree with the appearance of Coherence. However, since it is a beta, I expect that will improve. The basic functionality appears to work well. Seamless drag/drop between Windows/MacOS is a welcome feature in the latest beta as well.
As a followup to my earlier message, I just configured the latest beta to use my Bootcamp partition instead of running off of an image file located on my OS X partition. I did indeed see one core sitting at 100% or so for the time I was running it. My guess is that this is either a bug, or it's a result of directly accessing the disk partition. I'm going to look at the Parallels forums and see if anyone else has noticed this behavior.
As a followup to my followup, it was the Apple Keyboard Manager that was causing the high CPU issues on my system. Starting the XP task manager, and killing the kbdmgr.exe process fixed the issue for me.
Thanks, Steve! Killing kbdmgr.exe fixed the high processor usage. I haven't quite figured out how to prevent it from launching at startup, but I'll get around to that shortly.
Now the only problem is shared networking, so I can use my VPN in both. Doesn't seem to to go for me, yet, but I'll keep digging on that. If you've got any suggestions, I'm all ears. :)
I solve the taskbar/dock issue by lacing the dock along the right and the taskbar along the bottom set to auto hide. I don't know why most people leave the dock on the bottom - with all current Macs being widescreen, i suits me best along the right and works perfectly in this situation.