Battery life has also been extended for Parallels operating on a notebook, giving users back about 20% of their typical battery life while running a virtual machine. That is of course as long as the underlying system hardware is present. And users can also support 64-bit virtual machines. To further increase the power of the new platform, Parallels' users can now use up to eight CPUs and 8GB of memory to a virtual machine. Parallels has obviously spent a significant amount of time focusing on performance.
Application responsiveness is further enhanced as the virtualization engine has been optimized to consume 15-30% less resources than previous versions. They also updated the hypervisor technology, the Adaptive Hypervisor, to dynamically allocate resources to meet user needs. The company claims that improvements have been made to the platform to include a speed boost up to 50% faster than the previous version. So the Parallels team answered with a performance makeover with 4.0. It sounds like one of the complaints Parallels often heard from its customers had to do with performance issues. The new version adds more than 50 features and product enhancements, including the ability to run Leopard Server in a virtual machine. Parallels has announced the release of its latest version of the company's desktop virtualization solution for the Mac, Parallels Desktop for Mac 4.0.