Hey, this time I catched this early. When running VirtualBox I see no big difference on battery drain, at least nothing that can't be attributed to extra workl

Hey, this time I catched this early. When running VirtualBox I see no big difference on battery drain, at least nothing that can't be attributed to extra workload. I think that the last version of Parallels I used was 6, so I can't really talk about it, but again, my experience at the time was the same, the battery lasted more or less the same. A link that someone else posted blamed the crappy windows drivers by Apple and it does make sense. As for your other questions, I have 16GB of RAM, I've used windows 7 and 8 VMs with 2, 4 and 8GB in this laptop. Now, you have to take into account that I don't usually use windows VMs as normal machines, I usually fire it up, do whatever I need to do and shut it down. Once said that, giving it more ram helped to some extent, but not much. For example, the difference from 2 to 4 was much more noticeable than from 4 to 8. I haven't tried with more memory and ended up leaving it at 4GB. I kind of feel the need to point that I'm talking from memory with nothing like hard evidence or tests, so don't take this as an fact or anything like it :) The most recent example I can think of was Inkscape. I suddenly needed to edit a svg, couldn't install Inkscape on OSX (I had a problem with XQuartz, a requirement) and the only suitable VM I had at hand was windows 7. After firing it up and installing Inkscape there, I found that redrawing the screen took 10-15 seconds, every time I moved the svg around. After trying to work on it for a few minutes I found it so exasperating that I prefered to go back, fix the issue with XQuartz and use Inkscape in OSX.