Toning down Kaspersky

Kaspersky's avp.exe process was hogging resources and causing windows to act like a dog. I turned off things like

anti-phishing
anti-spyware

and also changed so scans and on-access checking was a lot less aggressive, for example not checking every file, and only checking files when opened. I set it so that it paused while OneNote was starting up.

Getting Windows to recognise increased Parallel's Virtual Disk size

A week or two ago I increased the size of the virtual disk image that Windows XP was using - from 9 to 20 Gb - using the Parallel's image tool. Actually, I changed it from Expanding to Fixed size as well, as I found hints that it would improve performance, which is a bit slow in Windows.

Today I got Low Disk Space warnings, and found that C: was only 9Gb. I tried using these instructions to expand the NTFS partition up to the whole space available.

I also got into the Virtual Machine settings in Parallels and changed it so that it was using Shared Networking (VM and host appear on same IP), and Shared Folders for My Documents = Documents. Now My Documents is my Mac's Documents folder, which is much better than having to access a network drive (X:).