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Boot Camp v1.4 and VMWare... slow boots into XP?

majordude

majordude

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Apr 28, 2007
2,443
75
Hootersville
Okay, I don't know if this is just me or if this is par for the course.

When I boot into XP from VMware, it does so at normal speed. If I boot into Boot Camp, it takes 1-2 minutes to load my "personal settings". That doesn't seem right to me.

Is this normal?

Also, I had been running Parallels by itself (not hooking into Boot Camp) and used an external HD as a shared drive. If I double clicked on a file from inside Parallels, it loaded like it was native to XP.

When I do the same with VMware (opening a file on a shared drive hooked through Boot Camp), it takes a good 30-45 seconds and seems like it is using a lot of memory.

Is this because of Boot Camp, VMware or a little of both?

I'm thinking about uninstalling VMware (I'm on a trail) and installing Parallels hooking into Boot Camp.

1. Will this just screw everything up on my Boot Camp partition? (I know how little XP likes installing and uninstalling things).
2. Will Parallels run Boot Camp faster?

Thanks for your feedback! :eek:
 
With the first part of your question, I'm guessing it would take Windows longer to switch back and forth because it thinks it's running on new hardware and has to install new drivers.

You could always try Parallels too (although I'd be a bit worried they'd conflict with each other).

I have coworkers using both, though one thinks VMWare's Fushion is much better, which seems to be what I generally hear (the other one just refers to Parallels as "okay"). I don't have any experience with either yet (I'm buying Fusion though based on his advice).
 
Wolfpup said:
With the first part of your question, I'm guessing it would take Windows longer to switch back and forth because it thinks it's running on new hardware and has to install new drivers.
Click to expand...

Hmmm. Never thought of it that way but it makes sense.

You could always try Parallels too (although I'd be a bit worried they'd conflict with each other).

Wolfpup said:
I have coworkers using both, though one thinks VMWare's Fushion is much better, which seems to be what I generally hear (the other one just refers to Parallels as "okay"). I don't have any experience with either yet (I'm buying Fusion though based on his advice).
Click to expand...

First off, don't buy either. Both have trials so you can see which one you like best before you blow any money.

I think both have quirks that can be irritating...

Fusion

You can't make a short cut to the virtual machine you want to run. You have to load up Fusion, call up the machine you want and (maybe because it is a Boot Camp partition) have to authorize running of it (like when you install a program).

Parallels

1. If you are scrolling down a page and your mouse goes outside of Parallels it doesn't know that it is the active window and the mouse stops moving. Really irritating!

2. If you open and close a virtual machine more that three times (in my experience) the machine is unable to create a LAN connection. If you open up iStats you can see that it creates LAN bridges and doesn't release them when closed.

3. For reasons I can't seem to deduce, Parallels will try to reinstall Parallel Tools (I think they are XP drivers) within XP at random times. No idea why.
 
Anything else weird with Fushion? That dosen't sound bad to me if that's as bad as it gets. My coworker dosen't have any complaints with it (I've heard the thingee where it sort of hides Windows so it looks like just the program is running might not work perfectly, but I don't really care about that).

I'm a bit hesitant to try the demos, just because I'm almost certain I'm getting Fusion and I don't want old files left behind (I know they both plug into the OS at low levels, can't remember if Fusion uses kext files and the other uses something else, or vice versa...)
 
Wolfpup said:
Anything else weird with Fushion?
Click to expand...

I haven't noticed anything else besides that to irritate me.

As I said in my original post though, opening files in a shared directory is slow... but I don't know if that is Boot Camp or Fusion's fault. I'll have to install Parallels with Boot Camp to see if things improve or stay the same.

If they stay the same I'd say that Fusion is the better of the two.
 
Post what you find out about it! If I'm understanding right, you're:

-running Windows through Fusion, loading it off of a Boot Camp partition
-hooking up an external hard drive, which is recognized by OS X, and then Fusion shares that to the copy of Windows.

And that's slow to just open files off of that? That seems weird. I wonder what the transfer rate is and why it would be slow.
 
majordude said:
Hmmm. Never thought of it that way but it makes sense.

Fusion

You can't make a short cut to the virtual machine you want to run. You have to load up Fusion, call up the machine you want and (maybe because it is a Boot Camp partition) have to authorize running of it (like when you install a program).
Click to expand...

Not true, I use the alias to my WinXP virtual machine and it launches Fusion - no different from opening a Word doc and it launching MS Word.
 
Wow.

I uninstalled VMware so I could install Parallels. It seems I lost my serial so I went back to Parallels.com to find out how I could retrieve it.

I'm glad I did.

First, I couldn't figure out how to retrieve my serial number even though they have a FAQ and other links to worthless information.

I tried to find their forum (which I remembered visiting several months ago) and I found a link to "Community"... that sounds like a forum doesn't it? Well, it's not. I have no idea what that is.

I went to Google and found it: http://forum.parallels.com

I found a post from one member to another (no signs of support) telling them where the link was on the payment site to retrieve the serial number.

I then typed in "Boot Camp".

Again. Wow.

Here was a STICKY (not a regular post, but a STICKY!): How to: Resolve trouble between Parallels and Windows under Boot Camp

Another post: Parallels says: "Unable to open disk image Boot Camp!"

And another: My experience... Parallels is a disaster!

After spending about 10 minutes reading these threads and others it is clear to me that these aren't random issues or problem child posters. There is an obvious lack of support, slow updates, and updates no one needs while real problems go unfixed.

Needless to say, I'm not about to try running Parallels with Boot Camp. :mad:
 
maestrokev said:
By default, your virtual machine is store in the folder Virtual Machines with the extension .vmwarevm Just make an alias to that file and either put the alias in the dock or on the desktop.
Click to expand...

Wow, you're right! Didn't know how to to that!

Is there a way to change the icon from the alias to the standard icon from VMware?
 
majordude said:
Also, I had been running Parallels by itself (not hooking into Boot Camp) and used an external HD as a shared drive. If I double clicked on a file from inside Parallels, it loaded like it was native to XP.

When I do the same with VMware (opening a file on a shared drive hooked through Boot Camp), it takes a good 30-45 seconds and seems like it is using a lot of memory.
Click to expand...

I can't confirm this just yet but I fiddled with everything I could have inside of XP and it looks like the "problem" I encountered with piss poor performance is at least partially due to having System Restore (an XP app) running in the background. I have turned it off and everything is much faster but no where nearly as fast as VMware or Parallels and XP alone. Boot Camp really puts a load on performance.
 
majordude said:
Wow, you're right! Didn't know how to to that!

Is there a way to change the icon from the alias to the standard icon from VMware?
Click to expand...

Sorry, not sure about changing the icon, still new to Mac OS X myself :)

Regarding what you found about Parallels forum. Yeah, they hide it pretty well, sad when you have to Google to find it instead of linked from their home page. I decided to go with Vmware after reading so many negative reports on Parallels support. So far works perfectly for me, very little cpu load and memory hit.
 
maestrokev said:
So far works perfectly for me, very little cpu load and memory hit.
Click to expand...

I don't know what the deal is with Boot Camp. When I run either VMware or Parallels without it I can download files to a shared drive without issue. But with BC installed and running VMware (again, I don't know if the same is true with Parallels 'cause I'm not going to try running it with BC after my venture to their support forum), downloads seem to hit a bottleneck. If I download to a folder on XP it works fine. If I download to an external Firewire 800 drive (REAL FAST :D) it bogs down and acts like it is a USB 1.0 drive.

It's really disappointing. :(
 
majordude said:
I don't know what the deal is with Boot Camp. When I run either VMware or Parallels without it I can download files to a shared drive without issue. But with BC installed and running VMware (again, I don't know if the same is true with Parallels 'cause I'm not going to try running it with BC after my venture to their support forum), downloads seem to hit a bottleneck. If I download to a folder on XP it works fine. If I download to an external Firewire 800 drive (REAL FAST :D) it bogs down and acts like it is a USB 1.0 drive.

It's really disappointing. :(
Click to expand...

I thought VMware running BootCamp can't see Firewire, only USB drives?
 
maestrokev said:
I thought VMware running BootCamp can't see Firewire, only USB drives?
Click to expand...

It's not direct. It's mapped through a shared directory. In Windows I named a directory on my external (Firewire 800) and named it "Temp"... then, in XP, I created a drive "T" that points to "Temp".
 
Just an FYI, some of the terminology used in this thread is making it confusing for me to read. When running Fusion or Parallels you can't be running Boot Camp. You're using them with either their native file that pretends to be a hard drive, or running Windows from the Boot Camp partition.

Anyway, I could understand if these products had slower file access when reading or writing to the Boot Camp partition-like maybe there's more CPU overhead, or whatever involved with that.

But it sounds like that's not happening, it sounds like sharing another location outside that partition is what's slow, while it's NOT slow when used with a normal VMWare hard drive image (or whatever you call it). And I don't get that. Why would it matter if Windows is running off that file or running off the Boot Camp partition when it comes to accessing stuff OUTSIDE what Windows sees as it's hard drive?
 
Wolfpup said:
But it sounds like that's not happening, it sounds like sharing another location outside that partition is what's slow, while it's NOT slow when used with a normal VMWare hard drive image (or whatever you call it). And I don't get that. Why would it matter if Windows is running off that file or running off the Boot Camp partition when it comes to accessing stuff OUTSIDE what Windows sees as it's hard drive?
Click to expand...

I don't get it either. But it is slower than a true VMware virtual machine (non-Boot Camped partition).
 
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