Hello there, I'm quite new to using Parralels Desktop, and I'm trying to figure out wheither to use Windows 7 Professional or Windows 8.1. First off, my computer specs are as following: Macbook Pro Retina 15" cpu: 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7 memory: 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB disk: 256GB SSD The primary need of my Windows VM, is to develop software to the .NET platform, using Visual Studio 2012, SQL Manager, Expression blend etc. As of right now, I have windows 8.1 installed with Parallels 9, and I'm just a little bit disappointed of the performance. Visual Studio 2012 (with Resharper plugin) seems a bit sluggish, and I would think that my specs should be enough to handle the VM. I Have dediciated 4096MB ram and 4 cores to the VM, also i set it to use DirectX9 instead of 10, because i saw someone recommending it in a blog post. To sum up, does anyone think that windows 7 might perform better for the types of applications I'm running, with my specs? Or does anyone have some hint as to how i might improve my performance? Regards, Claus Hansen
