Parallels with Boot Camp partition slowing down Mac

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
I've had a MacBook Pro for around 3 months and have used it with Parallels and have been very happy with it. I was amazed how fast Windows XP ran on the Mac and as well OS X performed well. Now with the newer release of Parallels supporting Boot Camp partitions I decided to go that route figuring I can use Boot Camp for gaming and otherwise run Boot Camp through Parallels. Once I went this route though Windows slowed down a lot. Most of all when I went into OS X it as well ran much slower if Parallels was open. Most of this delay occurs when booting up Windows but as well even otherwise it runs slower. Has anyone else been experiencing this? I'm not sure if it's something I'm doing wrong or something that may be fixed in a future Parallels update since this is a new feature.

Unfortunately I'm ready to go back to a Parallels Virtual Drive. I know I can use both Boot Camp and Parallels separately as well. Most of the problem is with hard drive space then but maybe once Boot Camp works on external hard drives (I hope it will soon) I will go that route.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 1
    Part of that has to do with how Parallels virtualizes hardware. If you install Windows natively into Parallels, Parallels installs drivers that talk directly to Parallels. It doesn't have to virtualize the hardware itsef, the driver does all the work. If you instead are pointing Parallels at a "native" Windows partition, then Parallels has to virtualize the hardware, because Windows is using the "native" drivers, not the Parallels drivers. Virtualizing hardware takes up a *lot* of CPU time.



    It may be possible to speed things up in this case by installing the Parallels "hardware" drivers onto the "native" Windows partition. Unfortunately I don't know enough about Parallels (pretty much nothing, actually) to tell you how to do that.
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