Rob Wilkerson

I run a number of Parallels virtual machines on my Mac. One of these is my "primary" Windows XP machine that I use to VPN into the office, maintain my financial records using Quicken and other key tasks. It stays open most of the time and gets used...well, every once in a while.

To expedite the opening and closing of the VM, I selected the option to "Start VM automatically when it is opened" and also the option to "Exit application on VM shutdown". Then, just the other day, I decided that I wanted to increase the amount of memory I had made available to the VM. To do this, i have to edit the VM settings, but I can't do that while the VM is running. Uh oh.

Because I set the VM to start when opened and the application to exit when the VM was shut down, I had completely closed off any access to the VM settings.

I spent a couple of days corresponding with Parallels free support via email and, frankly, got what i paid for. Responses to my questions were not particularly timely in most cases, they were hasty and, as far as I could tell, wrong. I was told that I could access the settings by pressing Command while double clicking the dock icon and continuing to hold down Command for another 20-30 seconds.

UPDATE 04.17.2007 {

So 11 days after our last communication I heard back from Parallels support and they provided more "conventional" instructions that actually worked.

1. Open Finder and navigate to the VM's pvs file, typically located in ~/Library/Parallels.
2. Cmd+Double-Click the pvs file, but do not release the Cmd key.
3. Continue to hold the Cmd key for up to 20 or 30 seconds (it only took a couple of seconds for the settings window to appear for me).
4. When the settings dialog appears, go about your business.

}

When that didn't work after clarifying with the support engineer three times, I posted to the Parallels forum and was given an answer that worked within an hour or so. Turns out the pvs file created by Parallels is just a text-based config file with a fancy-schmancy extension. I changed the AutoShutdown and Start auto settings as shown:

Start auto = 0
AutoShutdown = 1

That's all there is to it. I changed what I wanted to change and then set those values right back so I could start up and shut down with as little effort as possible. Now I know how to get back in there if I need to do so.

For anyone who's interested, the forum thread I started can be found at http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=10704. Many thanks to hairyneanderthal for his (I'm assuming this persona is male) help.