Parallels?

Hi all, I recently demoed Parallels 5 on my (2 month old) MacBook Pro. I installed Vista Black on it, it works well however it slows down my machine significantly. Would this be fixed by downgrading to windows xp on the VM or should I try out a different program instead of Parallels? If so what would be recommended? I'd hate to spend $80 on the license for Parallels if it isn't the best option.

Take a look first at Virtual Box - which is free anyway. I don't have experience of it myself, as I'm a VMFusion user (and I use XP which gives me no speed problems), but others speak well of Virtual Box (VirtualBox)

I was a huge Fusion supporter, but when I went with Fusion 3 and Windows 7 I started seeing some serious slowdown. I reloaded SL and the VM and it was better for a while, but it went back to having issues. This was basically a clean Windows machine. I recently loaded Parallels and so far it seems the performance has been better. Only time will tell. I also tried VirtualBox and it seemed real nice (price was right), but it used way more resources than Fusion or Parallels.

I just went with Parallels. Initially is felt slow on my MBA and was buggy. They issued an update this past Monday and it's like a new program. Faster and I don't experience the bugs. I'm running Windows 7.

Thanks. Downloading now. I ended up buying Parallels as it seems to be pretty decent so far.

I just installed Parallels 4 yesterday and have been playing with it since. Except for a bug where it claims that it is unregistered and can't be updated, according to the preferences, it did update and the web site shows that it is registered.

But, I have loaded two virtual machines, XP and Debian, and both work just about like they were on a native machine. XP was loaded from CD and Linux was an Internet install and both completed with no glitches. XP has no problems at all, but with Linux I haven't managed to adjust the screen resolution to optimum. Still looks fine, though.

It takes a little getting used to as regards external media. Depending on where I am at the moment, I will insert a CD or flash drive and wait for it to show up and it doesn't. Then I find that it mounted in Linux, or OSX instead of Windows. So I have to get used to disabling I/O hardware once I am through with it. Possibly I haven't found the proper way to handle mountable media yet.

As far as a load on the machine, or slowdowns, I have noticed absolutely none, even with all three active and running active programs. The CPU meters seem to be little different than when just OSX is running. However, this is a 4 core i7 IMac, so results may be different on an older machine.