Parallels Coherence

please give me details on the LATEST version of parallels

I was wondering how exactly parallels and coherence, in particular, worked.

i apologize if coherence isn't what i think it is. I'm referring to the ability to have Windows windows run on top of the usual OS X desktop.

moving on to my questions:
-is there a performance/battery impact with parallels and coherence compared to just running windows in bootcamp? (note: i don't care about increased memory usage; i have more than enough)

-does the touchpad work like it does in OS X(including 3-4 finger multi-touch) or does it devolve to bootcamp quality?

 

Coherence just hides all of Windows, so your windows apps just show up like they are Mac apps... they still look like Windows windows but the actual OS is hidden to you.

Parallels uses more power, cuz it is always hard at work. If you have an auto switch GPU it also kicks on your higher end GPU which can use even more... unless you use gfxCardStatus to manually stop it from doing so.

Its still in OSX so the touchpad still works fine.

 

The nice thing about running Windows in Parallels instead of BootCamp is that your TimeMachine backups will backup the VM too. It also means that with Coherence, you can flip between Mac and Windows applications seamlessly because they all live beside one another and aren't in separate interfaces (i.e. VM window for Win7 apps and native for OS X desktop for Mac apps). I definitely prefer running things this way and my trackpad gestures work in this scenario nicely.

 

thanks for the replies guys

alright, so expose and 3-finger page-home/end work perfectly?

also, on the issue of power consumption. which will grant me more battery life?

1. booting into bootcamp and running my windows apps from there
or
2. running my windows apps in coherence mode?

 

Coherence. Windows isn't all that great with power management and so using it natively rather than inside of OS X will tend to run you battery down a little faster.

 

i'm just wondering how that is even possible...can someone technical explain this to me? sounds like running 2 OSes should be at least be a little bit worst for me.

 

Parallels installs a toolset into the virtual machine which sets up specialized drivers to take advantage of hardware virtualization components. In the MBP, the Intel processors have a virtualizatiin instruction set, so the VM can get pretty close to running at native speed. The only bottleneck is the hard drive, which is where an SSD drive comes into play.

 

A Virtual Machine is a virtually allocated space where a user can install an operating system. This operating system can be the same as or different from the native OS running on the machine. It is the job of the virtual machine software, i.e. Parallels, VMWare, VirtualBox, to manage the resources allocated to the virtual environment. The only thing that the native OS is aware of in this scenario is that another program is running that is using some subset of the total physical resources available.

In this case, Mac OS X knows nothing about Windows 7. It only knows that a program called Parallels is running and requesting to use, for example 1 CPU, 2GB RAM and 100GB of HDD space. The translation of requests and responses is handled by the virtualization software. To add this, hardware and software manufacturers, now aware that more people are using virtualization to run operating systems, add support for it into thier products, e.g. Intel has hardware virtualization support built into its processors to allow virtualized environments to fully utilize the power of the processor without the need for an intermediary.

In your case, running BootCamp means that the hardware is natively running Windows while Parallels means that Windows is running inside of a program that runs on Mac OS X. This means that OS X has the final word in terms of resource management in the latter case as Parallels is only a piece of software running, not a native OS.

I could probably go on but you get the idea.

HTH