As soon as you make a bigger install (e.g. Visual Studio) the disk IO kills the host! Mac Book Pro 2 GHz here ... might be an issue with the slow internal serial ATA harddisk, however I would suggest an delayed writing, cashing, for the guest OS. My compleeme machine is rendered unusable during such installs, can't even browse 7. or something ;D Regards, Angelo
Virtualization does take it toll on the disk, that's true. Here's an interesting article on the subject: http://www.virtualization.info/2006/05/whitepaper-virtualization-and-disk.html
Well, that's true of a real Windows XP machine when running VS install, so the PW emulation must be really accurate! Seriously, I've noticed this also, however in fairness to PW that is also the case when I install Xcode tools on my MBP. Face it, the MBP is a great laptop, but like all laptops the internal HDD is slow (saves power). One solution is to place the PW virtual HDD on an external drive (e.g. firewire); this would solve the problem, but of course introduce some inconvenience. --Tim
Also, when suspending a VM, my MBP gets really laggy. It would be good if Parallels could play nice with the other programs.
