Virtual Machine queries

[DrBennyB]

Hi

I have trawled the forum for some help on this but can't find what I am after, maybe I am not being specific enough?

Anyway I have a MBP i7 2.2Ghz with 8Gb Ram and Radeon 6750 1Gb
I have installed Win7 under latest and most up to date version of Parallels

My Virtual machine settings are
PCU's 2
Memory 4096Mb
Video 1024Mb - enable 3D acc / enable vertical sync

Also set to
Faster virtual machine - enable hypervisor and tune windows for speed
Power - Better performance

These settings really hit the MBP on general use (lags and beach balls )and also the windows system is not as snappy as I would have expected.

Am I missing something with my virtual machine?
I presume when I close Parallels all system resources are returned to the Mac and only used when windows is active?
I have a few PC games as well that I am trying to run through steam, now I realise that bootcamp will give the better performance but I wanted the convenience of parallels, however now games are also pretty poor.

Any help, even pushing me towards resources I have not found / aren't aware of, would be much appreciated

Thanks

 

[YanaYana]

The performance depends a lot on the processes running on Mac - make sure there is enough memory left for Parallels Desktop (Safari web content may consume a lot of memory so it may be reasonable to quit such applications)