ffg (01/01/2012)I find the whole W7/Parallels experience slow and tedious. Hoping that SD for iPad will render it redundant (even though I have roughly £150 invested in W7/Parallels!
Virtualization can be quite a hassle at first. First of all, make sure Your Mac has enough RAM. When You deal with virtualization, the more the RAM, the better the performances. Based on my experience, 4 GB of RAM are the minimum acceptable amount for a good experience.
Next, it is important not to assign too much RAM to the virtual machine, because that RAM is taken away from that available to Your Mac for its needs. A thumb rule would be not to exceed half of the available physical RAM.
Windows 7 requires at least 1.5 GB of RAM to give acceptable performances, 2 GB is the sweet spot for a virtual machine using it, so Your Mac needs at least 4 GB of RAM to be able to decently run a virtual machine with Win7.
I have a self-built PC, running Ubuntu Linux with 4 GB of RAM and a virtual machine with Windows XP using Virtualbox (an Open Source equivalent to Parallels). I assigned 512 MB of RAM to that virtual machine and I'm fine with SkyDemon, as well as many other applications.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Filippo