I have a late 2013 15" rMBP (i7/2.3/16GB/1TB) which generally still runs very well. I use Parallels 12 to run excel in windows (I work in financial reporting). I usually have a bunch of excel windows open through parallels and the laptop struggles a lot with that. The fans start going and the windows get a bit laggy and I sometimes start seeing artifacts and graphics anomalies. Is this due to limitations of my cyrrent CPU? RAM? or Graphics Card? I'm planning on getting a new 15" 2018 MBP (2.6/16/512) and I'm wondering if getting 32GB RAM instead of 16GB would help with this or whether 16GB is enough already and whether I can expect the new machine to perform better.
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MBP 15" Parallels Performance Advice
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It should run that with ease. I've run an SCCM server on mine! What version of Windows, and what are the hardware settings on the VM?
It may run like a dog if Windows decides to update itself in the background.
It may run like a dog if Windows decides to update itself in the background.
I do use Excel on mac sometimes and it works pretty well but I run into various minor annoyances that make the windows version my first choice and also some of my spreadsheets are connected to programs that only work on Windows (ie Quickbooks Desktop)
1) Which edition are you using? Standard has quite a limit on vRAM/CPU power, might be the issue. Can you share your settings screen?
2) Could be also an option to try a trial Parallels v13 and see if you get any problems
I had same MBP before and it had no issues running Parallels with lot more than few Excel windows. I suspect something else is not right. Unluckily, between the two systems, emulator and, of course, hardware, lots of things can cause this behavior. You should check the disk, slow system is often due to disk errors. System with VMs "disks" will be specifically sensitive to that. Windows may need to be checked. Are Parallels updated? Watch the prl_... processes of Parallels, sometimes go crazy. Check assignment of number of cpus and amount of graphical memory. Just few items coming to my mind. But as I said, this is nightmare of potential sources of slow operations...
I now have 2017 MBP with 16GB or Ram and can run a lot more than one Parallels session attached once - never had high memory pressure - typically pressure is ~33% and only once in the last 30days I got to ~66% memory pressure. Even with Parallels VM running. 32Gb of RAM is overkill for the setup you describe; unless you want to run multiple VMs at the same time save your money.
I am in same boat, I have used Parallels on a MBP '16, '17, and '18 without any performance issues at all - running Word, Excel, and a couple other apps that only have Windows versions. For awhile I used Boot Camp, but I really like Parallels and it works very well for me. Hope it does for you too!
BTW, I would love to just use Office on Mac, I use it for normal stuff, but one thing I do is some large mail merges/label creation etc., and that functionally really doesn't work at all on the Mac version of Office (Word and Excel). If that was fixed I would probably go to just Mac version.
BTW, I would love to just use Office on Mac, I use it for normal stuff, but one thing I do is some large mail merges/label creation etc., and that functionally really doesn't work at all on the Mac version of Office (Word and Excel). If that was fixed I would probably go to just Mac version.