13" i7 Pro, looking at Ultimate Air,HELP!

Perhaps an 8GB upgrade would be a good idea for your current machine. VMs suck up a lot of memory.

How do you have your VMware resources defined? I run a Win7 VMware image just fine on my 2011 13" i7. I only give Windows 1 GB of memory and 1 core, but I only run 2 applications in that environment at a time.

While my VM enviroment is running I do not see any perceived slowdown on the rest of my system. I will use more CPU however and the system occasionally causes the fans to become slightly audible, but this is only when I run a higher workload on the VM side which is not often, but thats why I got the i7 anyway

I would say try to et your ram upgrade instead of going for the air. It seems like you might be in need of more power than going backwards

Yes you can most certainly reallocate processor and memory for your VM. Windows may complain and force you to re-activate the license which has happened to me, but you can tweak the settings to find the right balance between the host and the VM.

Note that the camera on the Macbook Air is not a FaceTime HD camera. It's just a FaceTime camera. You may want to take this into consideration, if you're using Skype.

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I'd recommend the air. I got an ultimate 13. But if you upgrade your current ram, try crucial, I found 8 gigs for my moms MacBook pro for ~70$...

BigB82 said:

The sad part is that on this machine whenever I run the VM it always slows the entire machine down SO bad, I am wondering how much better off I am getting the ultimate 13 AIR considering I didn't jump the gun last year cause of lack of BLK, but the ONLY thing that kinda disappoints me is WHY they didn't give a 8gb option, where would I be losing out with this new machine in comparison to what i have now?


Thanks gang

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I would give VirtualBox or Parallels a spin to see if the performance jumps at all, in my use Fusion was a dog of a performer but everyone's VM is different...

BigB82 said:

I have a 13" i7 Pro and I basically own a used car business so I upload a lot HD pics of cars, multiple internet windows, chat, FaceTime, Skype, and more importantly I use VMWare Fusion to run Windows which is only for a small software that prints all my dealer paperwork.

The sad part is that on this machine whenever I run the VM it always slows the entire machine down SO bad, I am wondering how much better off I am getting the ultimate 13 AIR considering I didn't jump the gun last year cause of lack of BLK, but the ONLY thing that kinda disappoints me is WHY they didn't give a 8gb option, where would I be losing out with this new machine in comparison to what i have now?


Thanks gang

Click to expand...

Since you already have an i7 13" Pro, I'd suggest bumping up the RAM and picking up a decent third party SSD for your Pro, rather than going to an Air. It will be more cost effective for your small business since you'll take a big hit on a 4-month old notebook. It will be faster, so the only thing you'll miss out on is the smaller size. There are workarounds out there to get TRIM working on a third party SSD.

I have used both Fusion and Parallels Desktop, and settled on Parallels Desktop because it has had better performance in my experience. I used it over the weekend on my new i7 MacBook Air with 1.75GB and it ran Quicken pretty speedily. I suspect with 3-4GB out of 8GB allocated to it, it should be pretty quick.