With compelling choices available for free or at low cost, you might wonder why someone would shell out hundreds of dollars for products from Corel or Adobe. Sheer familiarity has a lot to do with it. It takes a while to learn the ins-and-outs of a graphic design app at the professional level and moving to a new app can take time. And because Illustrator and CorelDRAW have been around for so long, there's a huge library of tutorials available online to get you up to speed, and a large number of people who can help you if you encounter a problem (although Inkscape has been around since 2003, so it's no slouch in the community department at this point).

You also know that an image created in Illustrator or CorelDRAW will look the same in your app as it does in a copy of Illustrator or CorelDRAW installed on another device. You don't have to worry about compatibility errors or confusion when a file doesn't look the same across different devices. Raster graphics are the standard digital medium for hand drawing/painting 2D art that doesn't need to scale. These are the JPGs and PNGs of the world, whereas vector art is usually an SVG (scalable vector graphics file). In the raster medium, you can actually use the same tools that you do for editing images, like Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, Paint.NET, or even the built-in Paint app in Microsoft Windows. Of these, GIMP is both free and a credible competitor to Adobe Photoshop.

GIMP uses largely different menu navigation and keyboard shortcuts, so it can take some time for Photoshop users to transition to, but persistent seekers can save a lot of money once they get the hang of it. Related Guides.

Jump to. Symptoms. I am not satisfied with my Mac performance when I run Parallels Desktop virtual machine (VM). I am not satisfied with Parallels VM performance. Cause There might be multiple possible reasons for low performance, for example:.

Underpowered hardware. Using an outdated Parallels Desktop version or build.

Too many resources assigned to the virtual machine. Multiple anti-virus programs installed. Too many virtual machines are running. Virtual machine performance is directly related to computer's hardware resources. It is also very important to allocate even shares of hardware resources between host operating system (macOS) and guest (VM) according to the recommended system requirements of both systems. Note: brings a new feature: CPU Usage Monitor.

Look at VM window tray and CPU Usage Monitor will light up in red when CPU usage in Windows is above 70%. Click on CPU Usage monitor to see what processes in Windows use computer's CPU. Clicking on a process name will open Windows Task Manager showing selected process: Computer's performance mostly depends on several hardware components: CPU, RAM and hard disk. While CPU cannot be replaced at hand, most of Mac computers enabled for RAM and hard disk upgrade.

If your Mac uses a hard disk drive (HDD), it is highly recommended to replace the drive with a solid state one (SSD). This is the #1 recommendation for all Mac users which gives significant performance boost to Mac at 2-3 times. Contact your local to get assistance with the disk replacement.

TIP: you can check your Mac's drive type at 'System Information' report (click  About this Mac System Report. Hardware SATA/SATA Express) If you notice in Activity Monitor that your memory pressure is up to the maximum, it's time to check if your Mac allows you to do RAM replacement with higher modules capacity. Visit these articles for more details:. macOS.

Make sure that you have ample free disk space on your startup disk. Visit this article for more details:. Use to check what unwanted applications consume a high percentage of system resources (CPU and Memory). Make sure Time Machine backup is not taking place while you’re running the virtual machine. The backup process may slow down overall system performance.

Parallels Desktop Preferences. Make sure you're using the latest build for your Parallels Desktop version:. On the macOS menu bar click Parallels Desktop icon Check for Updates. Download and install the updates if available. Store your virtual machine within Mac HD (internal storage). Running a VM from external USB disk or NAS may significantly lower VM performance. Be careful running several virtual machines at once - each VM consumes considerable amount of resources and may slow down overall computer performance.

Virtual Machine Configuration. Shutdown your VM open its switch to Options tab Optimization Set performance to Faster virtual machine and enable Tune Windows for speed. You can also turn on the Better performance option under 'Power', but this may consume more battery. Switch to Hardware tab CPU & Memory make sure that the number of processors (CPUs) selected is not maximum (e.g. In most cases, half of total CPUs will provide optimal performance. Assigning more than a half of CPUs for the virtual machine may cause performance degradation for both Mac and VM.

Recommended Settings For Windows 10

Make sure that memory allocation is within the recommended level. Similarly to processors, best practice is to assign half of Mac's total RAM. NOTE: The amount of memory assigned to a virtual machine must be multiple of 1024 or Windows may behave inappropriately. E.g 1024, 2048, 3072 MBs and so on.

Recommended Microsoft 10 Settings

Under Advanced settings make sure that ' Parallels' hypervisor is selected. Under Hardware Graphics set Memory option to Auto (Recommended). NOTE: For Windows 10 virtual machines make sure that under Advanced Settings 3D acceleration is set to DirectX 10. If your Mac uses an HDD or a FusionDrive (not SSD), make sure that the option Real time virtual disk optimization is disabled: go to Hardware Hard Disk 1 disable Free Space: Real time virtual disk optimization. Starting from Parallels Desktop 13 this option was renamed to Enable TRIM and can be found in Hardware Hard Disk Advanced Settings. Start you virtual machine and test performance.