I am brand new to both Macs and Parallels. I just installed Windows 7 (via bootcamp) and then installed Parallels 7. Is it a bad idea in terms of CPU performance and battery life to leave my Windows 7 Parallels VM up and running on a Mac OSX Desktop/space? Most of the time I do not have anything running but I like the idea of having the Windows OS ready to use on demand. How does this impact battery life?? Second - is there a difference in terms of cpu performance or battery life if I use coherence versus non-coherence?
No and no. Running a VM naturally uses more battery and the view mode doesn't matter. If you are concerned, just put the VM into suspend when you're not using it. Oh, just realized you're using Boot Camp. Suspend doesn't work. You can put it in Pause mode. Steve
so the parallels documentation says that i can not suspend the boot camp VM, but i can do both..pause and suspend. i checked cpu and memory allocation and both work as advertised. looking at cpu/memory led me to the same conclusion you provided, if i dont suspend, im going to take a battery hit. thanks for the response!
