Parallels 5 in ALL VMs - annoying spinning beachball

[wrldwzrd89]

Anyone else get the spinning beachball in Parallels 5 after you log into Windows? Doesn't matter which Windows version - XP SP3, Vista SP2 and W7 are all affected. If it makes any difference, I have multiple monitors and have Parallels set to use all of them in full-screen mode (which is how I run my VMs).

 

[DoFoT9]

most likely because you do not have enough RAM?

 

[wrldwzrd89]

most likely because you do not have enough RAM?

Could be. The beachball doesn't last very long, and it only comes up when the VM starts. After that it works just fine. I have 2GB of RAM in my iMac, and 1GB is allocated to each VM. I never try to run more than one VM at once, for obvious reasons. I believe the max RAM for my Mac is 4GB - it doesn't accept the 4GB chips.

EDIT: I was thinking about upgrading my Mac's RAM anyway... this may be the perfect occasion to go ahead with the upgrade.

 

[DoFoT9]

Could be. The beachball doesn't last very long, and it only comes up when the VM starts. After that it works just fine. I have 2GB of RAM in my iMac, and 1GB is allocated to each VM. I never try to run more than one VM at once, for obvious reasons. I believe the max RAM for my Mac is 4GB - it doesn't accept the 4GB chips.

EDIT: I was thinking about upgrading my Mac's RAM anyway... this may be the perfect occasion to go ahead with the upgrade.

yup RAM problem right there.

2GB is not enough, especially if you are allocating half of your available RAM! 4GB would be sufficient i think, but that doesnt rule out the beach balls of course - the system will hang like that when large amounts of page ins/outs are being performed.

 

[Guiyon]

Another potential bottleneck is your internal drive. I always run into beachballing and just general slowness when trying to run a VM off the same drive as the main OS, assuming you don't have the VM on an external drive.