I open parallels and everything stops!?!

[EV0LUTION]

When I try to run windows XP with parallels 4.0.3844 my mac pretty much starts to act like my sisters windows laptop when she forgets to run a virus scan.

This is unbearable, I need to run windows XP for work and really don't feel like going out and buying an extra laptop. The crawl it slows my macbook pro to makes work imposable.

I know that virtual box is out there, but my boss wants us to use parallels, my mac seems to be the only one effected out of the 3 at my office.

I have 4 gigs of RAM and 2.4GHz of processing power, has anyone had this happen and fixed it?

 

[bmcgonag]

When I try to run windows XP with parallels 4.0.3844 my mac pretty much starts to act like my sisters windows laptop when she forgets to run a virus scan.

This is unbearable, I need to run windows XP for work and really don't feel like going out and buying an extra laptop. The crawl it slows my macbook pro to makes work imposable.

I know that virtual box is out there, but my boss wants us to use parallels, my mac seems to be the only one effected out of the 3 at my office.

I have 4 gigs of RAM and 2.4GHz of processing power, has anyone had this happen and fixed it?

What do you have set in parallels for XP to run on? Ram? HDD Space? etc.

How full is your MBP drive now? What other apps are you running while running parallels?

 

[SHIFTLife]

If you have 4GB of RAM in your machine, did you perhaps set the amount of RAM available to your virtual machine to 4GB or something close to it? If you did, you might want to try backing it down to 2GB. I use VMWare Fusion, but I can tell you if you set the RAM available to the VM too high in either product, you're not leaving enough RAM free for OS X to do it's thing, slowing your whole system down.

 

[Mpulsive81]

XP is pretty resourceful, shouldn't need more than 1GB of Ram to keep it running. I use XP in Parallels to VPN to work & then RDP to my office computer & 1GB is still sufficient. Double check how much memory is being allocated & check Activity Monitor to see what's hogging up your memory.