Do two Parallels coherence programs count as two VMs?

No, it's just one.

In my experience though, Coherence works better in theory than in practice. It's slow, windows don't move or resize well.

Instead I just run it full screen - you can have several virtual screens on a Mac and you can swipe between them with the trackpad. When you run Parallels that way, it runs Windows very well.

This is my Windows Experience Index score on my Mac Pro... but even on my I5 MacBook Air it scored a respectable 5.4... and "boots" up in 17 seconds.

Note: this is Windows 7, not 8.1. No interest in learning or using Windows 8.1

 

I have one of those arriving tomorrow.

Potplayer will probably work OK in a virtual machine, but I'd definitely look around for Mac-centric solutions to something as basic as watching videos - perhaps Mac Remote with VLC or MplayerX. You really don't want to have to fire up a virtual machine just to watch a video and the performance will never be as good as under OS X.

 

Hi regarding playing video in Parallels you can make the video stored within the VM to play on a Mac video player, I often do this with items stored on a remote drive that works better from within Windows.