I'm quite surprised you haven't gotten a kernal panic. Both VMware and Parallels flatly state you cannot run these two at the same time as unpredictable results can occur. Usually it's Parallels which gets hosed badly if VMware is running. VMware has low level processes which take over the network card and Parallels does a lot of fighting to get the control it needs so that it too can use the network. I'd like to see your numbers running each of these by themselves doing the same things. Make sure that you always use Activity Monitor to show all processes as vmware will show 6 or 7 different processes while Parallels will only show 1.
I dont run both at the same time usually but this is just to show the difference in resources used. They both run under the same specs. Actually I never run them at the same time this is just to get some specs
Just having a window open in Parallels doesn't get my CPU usage up anywhere that high. All the latest goodies enabled, and it gets around 11%. A 100% CPU usage means one core is completely swamped, and that doesn't seem normal.
They are both new builds I just made the parallels build when the beta was released. Both have the same progams installed VB 2005 and SQL
Not sure why you have these issues with speed. I'm running on an iMac 2.33GHz with 3GB RAM (1GB assigned to windows XP SP2). My Idle processor usage was: Parallels 2.5: 6-7% Parallels 3.0: 10-11% VMWare B4: 6% VMs are pretty much identical, just Nod32 antivirus installed and VS 2005 Pro. Disappointed to see Parallels idle usage nearly double in 3.0 but still way less than yours. FYI: I run the VM in coherence/unity mode. I have disabled sound (as under 2.5 it put processor usage up to 20%) and have no USB devices connected as just connecting a pen drive puts VMware up to 25% and Parallels up to 45-50%. I'd also recommend VMWare for development currently as B4 compiles my C++ and C# projects 20-30% quicker than Parallels does (not sure if this is due to the new SCSI disk format or not), but it is quite a saving. Cheers russell
I really prefer parallels but VM seem to run so much better and smoother and has alot less bugs. It like soon as I start parallels my fans kick on literally it puts a load on my computer instantly. VM doesnt do that. I hate go with VM because I did pay for Parallels but hey whats another 40 dollars I guess right.
