I first bought Parallels in... version three, I think. It was on my original Macbook Pro, 2006. I couldn't run Windows without EXTREME slowdowns. It helped if I quit all other programs. But I would find myself looking behind me to make sure a Windows user wasn't watching me wait thirty seconds for a menu to pop open. I upgraded to 4, then 6. No improvement. I glumly decided to use Boot Camp until I got a new MacBook Pro; which I have done. I bought a 2010 MacBook Pro 6,2 8GB RAM, etc. and moved everything to it. And Parallels 7 doesn't work any better ! Launching it is a severe performance hit. If I have to shut everything else off, I might as well be using Boot Camp again. So now the upgrade to 8 is out, and I have no reason whatsoever to waste another $50 on it. Unless someone has some idea what this curse is ? I thought 8GB of RAM would be enough to run a Windows 7 VM and Mountain Lion. Was I wrong? Or is this a settings issue? If anyone recognizes the "snail-like" performance, maybe there's a solution ? I could push the Virtual RAM for Windows to the limit, but I should think it would run in 2 or 3 GB RAM. Is this a 64 Bit issue?
I don't know what's going wrong for you. I recently purchased the new MacBook Pro Retina with 2,6 Ghz and 16 Gb RAM because I wanted to migrate and virtualize my PC with Windows XP and Linux, and even OS X because I no longer want to re-install all softwares when a machine breaks down. I just launched 4 machines, two in Parallels 8 and two in VMware : - Windows XP 1024 Mb - Windows 7 2048 Mb - OS X 4096 Mb - OpenSUSE 12.2 768 Mb This is the memory consumption :
Now I have shut down Windows XP and Linux, keeping Windows 7 and OS X. This is the new memory status :
