I really like Parallels 5 but games performance was worse than in P4 (I'm running Windows 7). In particular I had lots of crackles and pops in all audio. Removing all preference files seemed to help a bit (for audio streaming) but didn't help much for games. Also, when I had Parallels change the Mac's resolution so I could play a game in 800x600, it wouldn't swith back to my Mac's native resolution but stay in 800x600. After I found 3 copies of "coherence.exe" in the Task Manager I tried disabling all programs that Parallels installs with its Parallels tools. I shut down Parallels and mounted my virtual machine's hard drives on the Mac (right mouse click on the virtual machine and "Open with Parallels Mounter"). On the D: drive, I navigated to "Programs (x86)" and renamed the directory "Parallels" (which is where most of these programs are located) to "RENParallels". Restart and hey presto! things run quite a bit smoother now - in particular, screen resolution now switches back and forth as it should, there's less sound annoyance, and the whole thing feels smoother and faster (don't have a frame counter so I can't really say). I guess that some program in the Parallels folder is doing something that it maybe shouldn't do, at least on my machine (MBAir). So all of you who are not happy with Parallels' speed, give that a try. I guess coherence mode won't run as you'd like it but then I never use it (I've set Parallels to run in a separate space - I like switching between a Mac space and a Windows space; it makes my colleagues envious .
