I'm not sure what happened, but running my dev stuff via Parallels on my laptop is not the snappy awesomeness it was a year ago. (That reminds me, I should re-review my 17" monster after a year in the real world.) I wonder if it's because I've gone from using Windows XP with Visual Studio 2008 to Windows 7 with Visual Studio 2010, or because of changes in the new version of Parallels itself. There appears to be a lot of disk thrashing.
Or maybe it's because I'm used to the performance on my iMac. That beast has 8 gigs of RAM, and I can give Windows 7 4 gigs while happily using Photoshop or Aperture or some other memory hungry monster. It "feels" faster than my desktop at work, which is no slouch. My laptop, a 17" MacBook Pro from about a year ago, only has 4 gigs of RAM, so I typically run the Windows VM with only 2 gigs. I think the issue is Parallels itself, because the disk thrashing is in OS X, not the VM (there's a virtual hard drive LED you can see).
I'd like to upgrade, since I spend a lot of time using the laptop these days, because it's often easier as Simon requires attention. The upgrade is still a little expensive though, and I'm trying very hard to be disciplined and pay down the rest of the business debt that stacked up during my "self-employed" days.
When will RAM be 100 gigs for $50? :)
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