Today I had a bit of fun when IE in my Windows install in Parallels crashed. This caused me an hour of grief as I tried to get Windows back. At one point during this time Parallels was using 106% of processor, over 1GB real memory and 2.15 GB virtual memory. During this time my lovely Twitterers (I love Twitter) were kind enough to give me many suggestions along the way.

There is a very simple way to force a restart of Windows and I only missed it because it was not titled what I would have expected. Reset. This can be found in the Actions menu and also is the Parallels coloured arrow icon below the start button. Now that I know it – it makes sense. With all the suggestions that I got no one actually told me about the reset option. I thought I’d share this *obvious* discovery that I missed in case anyone else has a similar problem.