My BootCamp Windows 7 is slower than Parallels 9

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My BootCamp Windows 7 is slower than Parallels 9

Hello,

I purchased a Mac Book Pro last week and setup a Parallels 9 VM for Windows 7 Ultimate. Today I also setup Windows 7 Ultimate Bootcamp with the expectation that it would be faster than parallels but my performance test shows that it's 14 seconds slower. Below are the results.

MBP Parallels Windows XP 1:28 min

MBP Parallels Windows 7 1:35 min

MBP BootCamp Windows 7 1:49 min

My 6 year old Dell Precision 4:32 min

It was my understanding that BootCamp would always out perform Parallels why am I getting these results?

The performance test was run at least 10 times in each environment. The performance test is a MS Access routine / algorithm that I run on a daily basis. It includes data reads and writes, calculations, VBA etc...

Thank you

Posted on Jul 10, 2014 8:26 PM

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Answer 1

Oct 3, 2014 3:43 PM in response to Cations

It is no longer the case that BootCamp will always outperform Parallels Desktop. If you install Parallels Desktop and Windows early in the life of your Mac, the Mac OS will place both in the fastest portion of the Mac’s hard drive. Because BootCamp requires contiguous space on the drive, it will always be placed at the outermost portions of the drive, and these portions are the slowest. In the past, these differences were not that important, but as Parallels Desktop got faster and faster with each new release, these disk difference became really critical. This is why your tests showed Parallels Desktop performing better than BootCamp.

Kurt

Product Manager

Parallels

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