Excessive Wired Memory Usage

[rauckr]

I have a 2010 MacBook Pro with an i7 processor, 8 G-Byte of RAM and a 500 G-Byte hard drive with plenty of free space. Whenever I run a Windows 7 virtual machine under Parallels 7, ~ 6 G-Byte of wired memory is used. I have allocated 4 G-Byte of memory to the virtual machine. I would expect plenty of free space and that used to be the case but no longer. I am tired of an unresponsive machine and spinning beach-balls. Any ideas?

 

[Bear]

You don't say what else is running at the time, but I do have suggestions...

How many cores did you say Windows 7 could use? At most it probably should be 1 less than the number of cores your processor has. If the number or cores is the allocated is the same as the number cores you system has, try adjusting this first.

If that doesn't help or help enough, try changing the memory for windows 7 to 2 GB and see what happens and also 3 GB. One of those may find a comfortable compromise.

And if neither of those help, try a competing product like VMware - they have a 30 day free trial. Note, I had Parallels and disliked some of its features. I have not tried VMware. I no longer need to run Windows, so when the OS X upgrade needed a new version of parallels I stopped using it.