Parallels Problem, Paratext Windows Black

Question

I’m Paratext 9 in Parallels on my Macbook. A few days ago when I opened the computer from sleep with Paratext , the screen glitched out and I had to shut the computer down. Couldn’t even start up the computer after that. Long story short, one of the GPUs was causing the problem and I was able to fix that by installing a program to disable it (gfx). But now when I try to open Paratext, the windows are black. I tried first reinstalling Paratext and then disabling the hardware acceleration in Windows, but it still gives the same problem. Any other ideas?

Answer 1

It looks like you went to far in the steps and edited your Path variable (which you probably want to undo).
Try this instead and add a new variable.
It should look like:

image618×585 15.2 KB

Answer 2

anon055151:

and then disabling the hardware acceleration in Windows

Did you try to disable it inside of Paratext (Paratext menu > Paratext settings > Enable Hardware Acceleration)?

Comments

No, because the Paratext menu comes up as a black window.

Answer 3

Hmmmm… That is an issue we hadn’t considered before.

If you know how to create an environment variable inside Windows, you can create FIREFOX_DISABLE_HARDWARE_ACCELERATION and set it to ‘1’.

Comments

Would that be similar to this process? https://windows10skill.com/disable-hardware-acceleration-windows-10-8-7/

Answer 4

No, that’s changing the system registry.
Setting the environment variable is like this, but instead of editing the path value, you want to add a new system value with the name and value I posted above.

EDIT: If that works, it’s probably worth disabling hardware acceleration inside Paratext and then deleting the environment variable since it will affect Firefox on your whole system otherwise.

Comments

Does this look right? I’m not sure how to set it to 1 as you said.

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Does this look right? I’m not sure how to set it to 1 as you said.

screenshot1898×993 310 KB

Answer 5

I believe I did what you said, and then restarted Windows. But as you can see in the background, Paratext is still giving that problem.

Screenshot21802×990 127 KB

Answer 6

anon055151 - did you try a Paratext reset? Holding shift while starting Paratext to reset all of the settings?

Comments

I just tried that. No change.

Answer 7

Any other ideas? I tried installing Paratext 8 to see if that would work, but I keep getting various error messages. I tried resolving those with help from the forums here, but no luck with that either.

Answer 8

You could check you device drivers to see if windows sees any problems.

START -> “Device Manager”

should look something like this:

If you see any explanation marks or warnings on Display Adapters, It might be worth updating the driver.
Expand “Display adapters”.
Right click on the driver name. -> Update driver.

Answer 9

I checked the driver and everything is up to date and OK.

Comments

Just last week I “fixed’ two 2011 MacBook Pro 15” by disabling the AMD graphics in firmware and deleting kexts, as I assume you’ve done. Parallels and Paratext confined to work fine.

I’ll assume you’ve reinstalled the Parallels drivers in the VM and played around with the video memory allocation in the VM settings.

Blessings,

LivingField

This message was sent from my phone. please forgive abbreviated grammar, lack of politeness, and wrong spellings.

Answer 10

I just tried putting VM memory in Parallels down to the lowest setting, and that solved the problem. I guess that will teach me not to buy another 2011 Macbook