Thread was moved from "General Discussions > Website and Forum Discussions" to "Parallels Desktop for Mac > Windows Guest OS Discussion".
Stacey M
I spent today doing some fun work with Parallels using both virtual machine and bootcamp virtual machine and found some interesting things.
IN the best of all worlds where there is adequate memory (3gb or more), Parallels virtual machine is as fast as bootcamp running without parallels at all (booted directly to windows).
With 2gb of RAM or less, bootcamp booted directly is the best followed by Bootcamp under Parallels followed by the virtual machine.
All of this testing was done on a brand new iMac (lowest end current model which is a dream machine) with 1gb and then 3gb of RAM with Windows set as the priority and allocating 1/2 of the machine's memory to Windows. In reality, Parallels shows only 256MB of real memory use during this time but there must be something else going on that I'm not able to see.
I then applied what I had learned to my MacBook Pro (3gb) and am astonished how well it runs as a virtual machine. Bringing up Excel is instantaneous in the virtual machine - actually FASTER than when booted directly into Windows and that seems to make sense to me as the copy of Excel is totally in memory after the first access. The other beauty of the virtual machine is that one can "suspend" it and bring it back in less than a minute and all of the cacheing is still in place.
I was going to look at VMWare until these tests and there's simply no way that it could be any better. My MacBook Pro is the fastest Windows machine I've ever experienced and I'm just delighted with it. Memory is the key here - the more the merrier - and it's so cheap these days that there's simply no sense in not maxing out a machine.
My MacBook Pro is one of the earlier ones limited to 3gb so now I'm wondering - what would another gb get me????? <grin>
Last edited by a moderator: Sep 14, 2007