Toolbar

The Parallels Workstation toolbar has buttons for the most frequent commands used to start, stop, and otherwise manage a virtual machine and its window appearance.

Most of the toolbar buttons become enabled only when you start the virtual machine.

The default toolbar buttons:

Start: Click to start the virtual machine if it is stopped, paused or suspended.

Shut Down: Click to shut down the guest OS normally.

Suspend: Click to put the virtual machine into the sleep mode. If you need to restart the host computer, you may temporarily suspend the virtual machines and resume it from where you left off after the host OS restarts.

Detach Console: Click to show the Console tab of the Parallels Workstation window in a separate window.

Full Screen: Click to make the guest OS take up the whole screen. To return to Window mode, press Alt+Enter. The key combination for switching to the Full Screen mode and back can be changed in the Preferences dialog, available from the File menu.

You can easily add other buttons to the toolbar. Just right-click the toolbar, choose Customize Toolbar from the shortcut menu, and drag buttons to the toolbar:

Restart: Click to restart the guest operating system.

Pause: Click to pause the virtual machine when you want to free up resources (such as RAM) used by it.

Stop: Click to stop the virtual machine when the guest OS is having problems and won't shut down normally.

Note: Clicking the Stop button when the virtual machine is running causes the loss of all unsaved data. To turn off the virtual machine without losing unsaved data, use the Shut Down button or the normal shutdown procedure for the guest OS.

Reset: Click for a hard reset of the virtual machine when the machine isn't running properly and prevents you from resetting it properly.

Safe Mode: Click to run the virtual machine in Safe Mode.

Configure: Click to open the Virtual Machine Configuration dialog.

If you often work with snapshots, you can drag any of the three snapshot buttons to the toolbar as well:

Take Snapshot: Click to create a snapshot of the virtual machine.

Revert to Snapshot: Click to roll back the changes made to the virtual machine since the moment the last snapshot was made.

Snapshot Manager: Click to open Snapshot Manager. For more information, refer to the Working with Snapshots section.