IT Bytes

About a month ago I decided to upgrade my Parallels Desktop 3 to 4. I needed to do a fair amount of Windows Development work and 4 was hailed as providing large increases in performances and this, together with a years subscription to anti-virus, was good enough reason to upgrade. Oh dear, unfortunately disk space is a rare on my laptop so I didn’t backup my v3 disk and just upgraded to 4 feeling sure I would have no need to go back. 4 is so disappointing;
1. Vista performance – everything about using Vista feels sticky and glitchy whereas before it was absolutely fine.
2. Application performance – launching applications feels slow. Everything seems to run as if there is no concurrency. Launch two applications and you may as read a book before you get any sensible response. V3 was great.
3. Switching back to OSX – this was great in V3, a quick ALT-CMD-ENTER and I was out of full-screen Windows and back to OSX in pretty much an instant. In V4 I struggle to even get back to OSX let alone in a speedy fashion.

Overall I’d give V4 2/10 since it does run the applications but it’s pale impression of its older brother. Oh dear, oh dear.

[Edit] – Hopefully I may have found the problem. In the VM configuration is a ‘Show Advanced’ option, selecting this provided access to the CPU options. For some reason it was set to use only one core from my dual CPU. Selecting this seems to have improved things, I’ll update this blog entry should it prove to fix the above problems.