I recently switched to a Macbook Pro. I heard good things about Parallels, or at least the Parallels before now. I bought the software and used the option to virtualize a Bootcamp partition. It worked fine. Not long after booting up the windows partition, the cpu consumes about 50% and the laptop heats up so the fans come on. I thought this was the nature of virtualizing Windows in Mac. I'm not real interested in burning up my Processor in order to run two OSs. I tried VMware Fusion. It is quiet and doesn't eat up all my CPU processes. What's the deal guys. I thought Parallels 3.0 was beta tested for a while. This issue didn't come up? The issue wasn't resolved? I want to like parallels, but this performance is unacceptable. I need to be able to run some heavy applications that need a bit more than 50 percent of my CPU. I feel like I wasted 80 bucks. Also, I'm running Win XP pro. It's not even a resource hog like Vista. What gives. I got two options Parallels or Fusion. You guys maybe loosing a customer as quick as you got one. I'll give it a little time cause I'm hoping an update for Parallels is coming to address this issue 'cause I know I'm not the first to notice this issue, but it's not looking good.
There was an update released today. Make sure you have the latest version. Also make sure that you don't have some process running in the background on Windows that is using up CPU. I have a 2GHz MacBook Pro and Windows XP installed on Parallels, it uses 10-20% CPU when idle, so you shouldn't be getting above 20%.
I kept using the built in updater to check, but it never said there was an update. Thanks for the tip. It has decreased processor usage. The extremely bad performance really had me worried.
