Optimum performance of Windows guest for productivity

Hello,

I tend to use Parallels for mainly what are termed productivity apps: Office, Acrobat, etc. Haven't had too many issues with performance and with the current version of 15.1.x, performance is decent. I am wondering what settings I can change to squeeze out as much performance as possible. I tend to find unpleasing for example if the time to launch is an app is nearly instant, less than .5 seconds, or for example 50% longer. For a while I was using Windows 10, but have now switched to Windows 7 since it is so much snappier. MacBook Pro 13" Retina. Not the newest and only 8 gigs of RAM. Will upgrade eventually but as such, it is difficult for me to devote large amounts of RAM to the VM. Maybe that is part of the problem with Windows 10 performance. Example: launching MS Word or Acrobat is markedly slower in 10 than 7. I have tried to implement the main Windows tweaks that many recommend, have used various tweak apps, etc. Maybe there are other settings I can try though unsure what they are. In 10, I made a new VM using NVME. With the apps I use and possible used screen resolutions, unsure how much graphics memory is required. Maybe turning off graphics acceleration would be snappier. Maybe there's a toggle (using Intel integrated graphics card) to turn off Metal, maybe performance is not yet as good in such cases. Don't know. In Windows 10, I think there's a power setting for High Performance. For the disk, one can turn on write caching I think. Some services can be turned off to reduce RAM usage for example if one doesn't need to print or isn't using Windows in a domain. And so forth. Curious what else is there is, yet perhaps all such things only make a minimal gain. Windows 10 being noticeably lower than 7, perhaps that since I only devote 1.5-2 gigs of RAM, and as such, Windows isn't able like macOS to preload needed libraries.

 

This likely doesn't help given your HW limitations, but as a point of reference when I first created a Windows 10 VM I only allocated 2 GB of memory to it per Parallels's recommendation. I have a 15" mid-2015 MBP with an i7 quad-core processor and 16 GB of memory, and the performance was so bad that essentially the VM was unusable. I increased the memory allocation to 4 GB, and haven't seen notable performance issues since, so a significant difference. Just a data point that when it comes to Windows 10 at least, allocated memory could be a large limiting factor.

 

Yes it was my guess that Windows 10 needs a fair amount of memory. It runs somewhat ok if I am just using apps like Office or Acrobat but I think more RAM would help.