Barry Goldberg

Mac Pro, Parallels, Blue Screen of Death - nuff said

August 6th, 2008

 

Just a quick post so that this information gets out into the interweb some how.  It cost me $30 but I am willing to share this info for free since Parallels isn’t. 

 

Now this could be my own ignorance but I had a problem and it just wasnt obvious to me what was causing it. 

 

I have a new Mac, installed Parallels with Vista Ultimate (bootcamp partition).  Was working sweet!  Not surprisingly, after a while the VM would pause due to lack of activity.  Upon Resume, Vista would blue screen.  I found many references to this problem when I googled it, but no good solutions.

 

So I ended up emailing Parallels support a couple times to no avail.  I got no response; really don’t believe their system works.  I then called Parallels phone support and paying my money.

 

Turns out - DOH - that it was Vista that was going to sleep first (power settings) which was causing the VM to Pause.  After changing my settings to not sleep or hibernate -> all is well. 

 

The Blue Screen is still a bug they need to fix, but I can live with this solution.  Also if you want things to sleep do it through the Mac side.