I recently installed Parallels 3.0 on my new MacPro desktop with 2x quad core CPUs and 16 GB of RAM and created a VM with Windows Vista Business hoping it will run blazing fast. However, it turns out to be very, very sluggish and it is a pain to for example open Office documents with SmartSelect, as it takes for ever, and the applications (e.g. Powerpoint 2007) sometimes seem almost to freeze. Sometimes rebooting Windows works, but clearly this is not ideal. On top of that, I am experiencing the "failed to allocate memory problem, but inly with Vista - XP does not have this problem (see this thread). I have been running Parallels 3.0/Windows XP on my older dual core MacBook Pro and it works much faster there - how could this happen in a top of the line Mac? Any tips from the Parallels team on how to improve performance? Are you aware of the problem and plan to address performance issues on the multicore MacPros soon? Is this a MS Vista thing and would be better to revert to Windows XP? We need to be able to allocate more memory than the 1.5 Gb currently maximum when we have much more (is this a 32 vs 64bit issue?). We also need to allocate more than one processor to Parallels - are you listening? Are there other users that can report their performance experience with similar setup?
Windows Vista is a resource hog, even when not running under virtualization it is much slower than Windows XP. If at all possible, just use Windows XP.
