Having installed the Parallels 5 upgrade on my 3 GB Core 2 Duo MacBook, I was expecting a moderate performance boost with my Windows XP virtual machine. I made the upgrade in order to move to Windows 7, and although Parallels 4 supports Windows 7, Parallels 5 was supposed to provide some performance improvements across the board in addition to a better Windows 7 experience.
Performance boost is an understatement.
I haven't done any benchmarking yet, but starting apps (which used to take half a minute to several minutes, depending on the app) was unexpectedly fast. So fast, with Acrobat 9, for instance, that I didn't even notice that Acrobat had started. Powerpoint 2007 opened in about 4 seconds, and Captivate 4 took only 10 or 11 seconds to get running.
Parallels shared folders, which always took anywhere from 10 to 45 seconds to refresh, took around 8 seconds, no more, to refresh.
I am thus far delighted with this upgrade, and look forward to Windows 7.
