I have used Parallels on my MacBook (2Gb RAM) for over a month and it works great for my needs. I use Microsoft Office on it. I use an external monitor and the MacBook monitor. The montiors are *not* mirrored. Typically, I launch Parallels, drag it to the external monitor, flip to fullscreen. Volia!! One monitor for Windows and work, my Mac Book monitor for OS X and personal stuff. The problem here is whenever I do that, when I type in Windows the cursor disappears. I have to press the Control key and sometimes it comes back. And, no, I do not have the funky "Hide cursor when typing" (or whatever) checkbox selected in Control Panel. I checked. Also noticable is the performance degradation of Parallels. After a while, it has a hard time keeping up with my Bluetooth mouse. A lot of cursor flashing (redrawing?). Also after a while disk i/o is painfully slow. When Excel autosaves my 20Mb spreadsheets - everything stops for a while. Is it memory fragmentation? I allocated 1Gb to Parallels. Or is it disk fragmentation? I regularly defragment and decompress. I think the one thing I would like from Parallels in the next release is performance improvement. Thanks Parallels. Great product!
You might see a speed improvement if you reduce the memory you allocate to your VM. Try 1024 for Parallels (in preferences) and 768 for the VM. I've experimented with several combinations and that seems to be the sweet spot (or was when I did the experiments around beta 6). It's pretty zippy compared to a Windows PC laptop with a somewhat slower processor.
