Rampidbyter Rampid byter: A byte of my .Net developing life.

Lion released somewhat recently and I was, of course, waiting on the App store to download it immediately. Well, what a cluster that was. I had Parallels setup to dock my windows in a certain workspace, and when the new multi-desktop setup took effect I no longer was able to access my open and running Windows VM. It happened to be docked to a non-existent work space. Ended up fixing that problem, but many more performance related problems started plaguing me. Mainly in the amount of RAM that Lion requires.

At the same time Parallels 7 released and was hailed as incredibly fast and tuned specifically for Lion. What a lie that was. I am told the boot times of the Windows VM decreased significantly, and for a while I thought it was an incredible update. I again upgraded as soon as possible. My Windows Performance Index actually went up by .2 in 3D graphics. I was incredibly happy until Windows Aero started continually crashing. The result was sporadic black screens as the device driver failed and Windows recovered it only to stop Aero. Then the random streaks of odd colors started to appear on the screen that would last a minute or two.

Through out all these new troubles one thing positive happened as a result of the upgrades. I haven’t had a kernel panic in going on a month whereas on Snow Leopard with Parallels 6 I was crashing twice daily on average. So I’ve switched from system crashes to having a buggy graphics driver on a generally underpowered machine bogged down by the host OS.

I wish I could say that things settled down and smoothed out after Lion’s first update became available, or even after the Parallels 7 multi-monitor bug fix came out. Sadly things have hit the wall in terms of performance since the Parallels 7 update that released two+ weeks ago. If anything the system is performing so poorly that it takes upwards of 10 minutes to compile the .Net solution that used to take three. In addition to the poor performance my Windows Performance Index has actually dropped to 2.3 because of the flaky Parallels 7 video driver.

I’m left with no other options than conceding that Lion and Parallels 7 on a MacBook Air no longer leave the device as a satisfactory development machine. At present time I am considering other device options. I will miss the Air… but I won’t miss the horrendous performance.