hi, first let my say that i am pretty pleased with parallels letting me run windows smoothly on my macbook pro. but as soon as i start my windows instance i can see that in the activity monitor i get around 10% cpu load from this (showing as system activity - thus in red!) in the activity monitor and the fan 1 min later starts to run. i have overall 10% in "kernel_task" which seems to be responsible for this. unfortunately my fan starts running and is about 5.800 rpm then. i tried to reset the SMC thingie but it didn't changed anything. the problem also is that my macbook pro (new end 2011 model, quad core 2.2ghz, 8gb ram) gets really hot in the left corner where the power supply is. thanks for your help michael
I think that this is just the way it is, my friend, and we'll just have to live with it. Maybe there's an ultimate tweak for Parallels out there beyond what all the wizards have suggested here, but I think there's not much we can do here. After all, we are running, essentially two computers at the same time in one box, yes?
Quit anything that uses GPU to render its content, like Google Chrome. You should see ~10% CPU usage without it.