Parallels Desktop: Should I leave it running when not in use?

So I have a brand new iMac 27" 3.1 i5, it's mighty nice. I created a bootcamp partition with Win 7 and installed Parallells Desktop 6... all went well.

I won't actually be using the Win7 software all that often. not every day, or maybe a hour or two here and there during the work week or if gaming.

My question is do folks leave Parallels running? I heard that you can suspend it when rebooting the mac, (safer/smarter) than just stopping the virtual machine. But does PD eat a fair amount of resources if left running?

It's handy to have it there, and by the end of this week I will have upgraded the memory on my imac to 12 gig, so I have resources. But should I kill it when not in use to free up system resources?

thanks,
Brendan G.

miles01110 said:

It doesn't really matter.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply, but I would imagine that running a 2nd OS has some consequences on the PRimary OS's performance. No?