If you want, you can also go full screen and work with Windows 7 as you normally would. It's a great feature, but in dire need of some speed optimization. Both my MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro's fans were running at their absolute peak while I was switching between Mac OS X and Windows apps in coherence mode. While this coherence mode is stunning and has been perfected over the past few versions of Parallels, it's still a CPU sucker. Even more impressive: Quick launch icons and the Start menu are easily accessible: First, there's 'Coherence' mode which brings all your Windows applications and windows to your Mac desktop: Not just by the smooth installer and the built-in OS download feature, but by the level of perfection the folks at Parallels worked at the integration. Parallels is pure awesomeness when it comes to convenience, usability and integration. While it gives you the full-on Windows experience, it has its quirks. You hold down the 'ALT/OPTION' key during boot up, select your Windows partition and you're up and running in Windows 7. Convenienceīoot Camp makes your Mac feel like a Windows machine. Is the convenience of running both Lion and Windows side-by-side worth the performance loss? Folks who are doing some advanced multitasking and perform CPU/GPU intense tasks should stop and think twice. If you're just doing some basic office applications on your Mac, you will likely not feel a difference. Looking at all the benchmarks, you'd think that running Parallels Desktop 7 would be quite frustrating. Also, when running under high usage, audio stuttered every once in a while, which is annoying when listening to music but an absolute 'no go' when running professional audio applications on Windows.

Even keyboard input lags behind ever so slightly. Switching between these tabs on Boot Camp, however, is instant. For example, Parallels 7 produced noticeable delays when running IE9 with more than 10 tabs.

This drop ranges from quite significant (gaming, video encoding, heavy multitasking) to just a bit of an annoying lag. My conclusion: while Parallels is an incredible technical achievement, the Windows power user will notice a drop in performance. And I didn't just use it on my MacBook Air, but also on my 17' MacBook Pro and even played around with it on a Core i7 3GHz iMac with 8 GB RAM for a couple of days. Does everything feel snappy? How quickly can you switch from one application to another? Is there a visual lag when bringing up a browser window or playing video? How quickly do menus and sub-windows of your applications pop up (and close)? Over the past few weeks I've gotten a pretty good impression of how Parallels Desktop 7 runs Windows 7. To the typical user, performance equals responsiveness. Performance is not just about MBps, FPS and milliseconds.

Bootcamp or parallels for mac