Hello, I have an office that I set up with some iMacs and a current generation of MacBook Pro with the Core i3/5 series processors. They are all running Windows 7. I am having problems with the MacBook Pro. The user is stating that it is running very slowly. Here at another office he has been running Windows XP in boot camp. I know there is a performance difference between boot camp and Parallels, so I need some help in getting Windows 7 running its best under Parallels 6. Can anyone comment on the options in either Windows 7 or Parallels that should be set? The software is Autodesk's Revit Architecture Suite 2010 (Revit Architecture and AutoCAD). Thank you.
My office had a new iMac that had only 4 gigabytes of RAM and was running Revit through Parallels/Windows7. The Revit performance was noticeably slow. Our first step was to slim down the Windows 7 memory usage to the absolute minimum. The difference was obviously improved. The second step was to add another 4 gigabytes of memory...suddenly the performance was great.
Are there any Windows 7 services that most people don't need to have turned on that can be disabled to increase Parallels performance?
Graphics Cards also request Memory Resources RockK, Thanks for your replies and the shared link. I will try slimming down the VM memory usage. As a side note, depending on the application that you are running, Graphics Cards themselves request RAM usage. Here is an article for some information: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ram-memory-upgrade,2778.html
I found that 4GB was very slow, 6GB was a huge jump in performance, 8GB is ideal. I know it's an expensive upgrade but since I run Windows 7 in Parallels constantly and switch back and forth all day, it was essential to productivity.
Honestly I have MBP 2.4GHz i5/8GB/ 120GB SSD/ and the VM seems to run faster with 2GB RAM then with anything more than that. when i set it to 4GB it runs slower... my .02
