I use a MacBook Pro at work, but of course there are always one or two Windows applications that I need to run too. Consequently, I recently installed Parallels to allow me to run these both in the office and at home. I knew that others were using this method to run these apps, so I wasn’t too worried about getting it to work.
When I fired up Parallels for the first time though, the CPU usage shot right up and the whole OS X interface became incredibly sluggish for several minutes. The strange thing was that this was just starting Parallels itself, not booting the virtual machine. Once the application was started, sanity was restored. The offending process was “WindowServer”, so it seemed to have something to do with the graphics processing. There were reports of other folks having similar problems on the Parallels forum, but none of the solutions seemed to be definitive.
Then I tried starting Parallels while I was away from my desk. It came straight up with no problem at all. What was different? It turned out to be a Good Way USB Display Adapter I am using to allow me to run 2 external monitors from my laptop. Once this was disconnected the problem went away. So now if I’m at my desk, I unplug the USB cable, start Parallels, then reconnect. I don’t understand what is going on here, but at least I have a workaround.