Hi guys!! I have a mac book air and i am planning to install parallels to run windows...currently my battery works upto 6 and a half hours...after running windows using parallels, does the battery time reduce??? and after installing parallels,does the windows have the ability to switch the graphics when neede?? please reply asap....
Any heavy usage on the macbook air would drain the battery faster. Windows is no exception. Whatever you are doing in windows, if it's processor intensive it will drain the battery. Just having the VM run and do nothing really doesn't drain battery. I recommend use the "longer battery life" setting in virtual machine settings (Configurare the virtual machine, under options, there is an option on the left pane called Optimization). Half-way down that page is a setting called Longer Battery Life. Just click that and Parallels does a wonderful job with both heat and battery life
thank you for your advice...I will try it. what's the best option from your point of view parallels or bootcamp??
If you play games, boot camp is the only option. For everything else I personally use Parallels. Just because I love the MAC OS and having windows be in one space and mac in the other is indispensable. Just a small gesture and you can switch between the two os's. I do not like coherence as it's confusing and I actually like the separation of the operating systems.
I am not that much of a gamer...and I'd like to keep my mac clean and easygoing...may I konw the purpose for why u installed windows on your mac???
Majority of my work is in windows. I do web development, Visual Studio 2010/2012 beta development. I do winforms, web apps, any development work you can imagine. I run full SQL, etc on the laptop and have a different VM for each client since each environment is different (some companies require me to be part of the domain, etc). Parallels is perfect for this. Most people ask why not use Windows then? Well, I'm stick with Virtual Machines anyway, so I use the mac side of things mostly for personal (music, etc) and Virtual machines for all my work (office, etc). I also notice that real-world performance mac handles windows much better.
battery life macbook air While i don't know if this is the issue, i just bought a macbook air (13" running i7) and i have been using Parallels heavily and the battery drained in 4 hours.
Does your mac have 4GB or 8GB of RAM? The majority of users battling inferior battery life have 4GB. Thanks.
