Low Memory under Parallels

[BasilFawlty]

Ok, so I have Win 7 installed under Bootcamp. My Mac OS is the latest Lion. Recently I bought Parallels as part of a special bundle of software that MacUpdate was selling and I installed it without any problems tonight, using my Bootcamp install as the Win 7 installation. It works, but when I go to the Windows side it says I'm using 80% of my memory even with no apps running. I ant into Task Manager and looked at the "Performance" tab and it says I only have 1GB memory (I actually have 12GB installed). When I boot into Windows natively with Bootcamp, it shows all 12GB). Any idea why I'm only seeing 1 GB on the windows side when running in Parallels?

 

[plinden]

Presumably you have only 1GB assigned to the VM in Parallels - you can modify this in the VM configuration.

Don't set it to 12GB - that'll assign all your host memory to the guest VM and will slow your Mac to a crawl. I find, as a rule of thumb, that assigning a maximum of about 1/3 of the RAM to a VM (in your case 4GB) provides the best host and guest OS performance.

 

[BasilFawlty]

Presumably you have only 1GB assigned to the VM in Parallels - you can modify this in the VM configuration.

Don't set it to 12GB - that'll assign all your host memory to the guest VM and will slow your Mac to a crawl. I find, as a rule of thumb, that assigning a maximum of about 1/3 of the RAM to a VM (in your case 4GB) provides the best host and guest OS performance.

Ahah! Thanks! That did the trick (though it took me a while to figure out how/where to set the memory allocated to the VM. It was indeed set to 1GB, but I increased to 4GB (I have 12 installed)