How can I get parallels 6 to run well on my MBP I've been trying to run windows 7 on my MBP on parallels so that I can test different browsers.  Trouble is, it is just slow, I mean excruciatingly slow.  Like booting it up takes 15 minutes.  It's ridiculous.

I'm running a MBP with 4M Ram and and i5 quad core processor.  I mean really, this should be enough.  Any tips on getting this to actually perform?
I had the same issue. Moving the Parallels virtual machine to an external hard drive completely changed it for me, from terrible to tolerable. 

I'm using an old laptop hard drive, 5,400rpm (so not even a fast one), and it works fine.

All you need to do is plug in the hard drive,drag the Parallels virtual machine to the hard drive, and double click to open (or go through the Open virtual machine dialogue in Parallels.