4GB enough for running Windows 7 via Parallels?

cherishzm said:

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BTW, I'm planning on using an external monitor at work so screen real estate won't be an issue... Hopefully I will not miss the AG 17" display I'm perfectly happy with. Just want to get something new and light..

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not familiar with parrelels but some VM's need you to deticate a certain amount of RAM for it to use, is this the case and how much RAM do you have deticated to Parellels?

as the previous poster stated, it depends on how much RAM you will have dedicated to the VM. I have windows 7 running all the time in a VM, due to the nature of my work, and found myself having to dedicate 4GB to it because windows would pop up those messages saying i was low on memory, please close some apps. Once i did that, it was smooth sailing. I should note that i am on a MBP with 8GB of RAM, so i had plenty to spare.

I run parallels on my 11.6" with 4GB ram just fine.

Check the memory usage in activity monitor the next time you're working.

Alternatively you could pull 4gig from your current mbp and see what happens.

cherishzm said:

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I'm not using memory heavy programs W7 I assume. I use Internet Explorer, Quicbooks, and a couple more...Would 1GB enough for these?

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I do light work in Win7 and 1GB seems to work OK - however, I'm not familiar with the memory req of Quickbooks.

More than enough - I run my application software, MS SQL Server, Internet Explorer and Tomcat Webserver on it. That said - I'm have less than 100MB RAM avaialble when I do this, but then again - if you would swap, you would swap onto the SSD.

I do it fairly regularly with my 4GB 2011 MBA. I have 1.5GB allocated to Windows 7. On my MBP I would always leave Windows 7 running, but on my MBA I just make sure to close it when not using it so OSX can have the full 4GB. It isn't as nice as doing 6GB to OSX and 2GB to Win 7 on my MBP, but it works. The SSD's help with "virtual memory"....

I run Quicken 2011 on my 2011 MacBook Air using Parallels Desktop 7. It works fine with 1GB, though I think it runs a little bit better when I allocate 1.5GB of RAM and give Parallels Desktop 2 out of the 4 virtual CPU cores. Note I usually do not run significant OS X software in the background when I am running Windows 7 (just Outlook and/or Safari most of the time), so you may see how well 1 CPU core and 1GB of RAM work if you do need to have OS X applications running at the same time.

Worked perfectly on the 13" 2011 model that I had.

i have a 13" mba w/ 4gb (low end) that I just bought 2 weeks ago running Parallels 7 with Windows 7 Pro 64bit just fine.

I've got the 2011 13" and I use Parallels to run a couple Windows only apps for our VMWare environment and storage systems. I don't leave the Win7 virtual machine running all the time, but I'd say 20% of my day it is running to host vSphere or our internal management apps. The rest of the time it handles Outlook with my two mail accounts, web browsing and document editing just fine. I sometimes notice Outlook getting slow because it can be a memory hog itself. A simple restart of the app fixes that 90% of the time.

I use it for quicken and office and it runs grrrrrrrreat!

What about Windows 8? I tried the preview on an old laptop that fit the specs and it was unusably slow so I'm in the process of restoring that back to Win7. But I still want to give Win8 a shot so Im thinking if I should try it on my 11" MBA.

(BTW, I'm feeling very positive about Win8 on Tablets, but from my limited use of then I'm really not understanding the split old/new UI and how it should all fit on a non-touch computer so I want to give it another shot on a good computer.)

urkel said:

What about Windows 8? I tried the preview on an old laptop that fit the specs and it was unusably slow so I'm in the process of restoring that back to Win7. But I still want to give Win8 a shot so Im thinking if I should try it on my 11" MBA.

(BTW, I'm feeling very positive about Win8 on Tablets, but from my limited use of then I'm really not understanding the split old/new UI and how it should all fit on a non-touch computer so I want to give it another shot on a good computer.)

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Win 8 ran perfectly fine on my MBA....its just buggy as hell and nothing works yet. But it was fast.

Use Parallels to run Win 7 Ultimate on my MBA 13" i7. Use it almost exclusively for Quicken 2012. Works like a charm and is faster than the same setup on my iMac i7 with 8 gigs of ram. That SSD really makes a difference...

Win7 on Parallels runs fine. I allocated 2GB RAM for it in the VM setup and it runs great.

I also run Windows 7 with Parallels, as Quicken 2004 is my most used program.

No problems with speed even though I have a basic 11.6 MBA with 2gb.

tut

What about Mountain Lion?

Great stuff above, really good info.

Any ideas about what will happen when the new OS MOuntain Lion comes out and it's affect on RAM usage?

In the market for new machine and trying to see if the 16GB MBP is worth the extra $$$. Trying to run parallels with Windows 7 and Office stuff( I know it's probably overkill, but then I'm covered for future stuff, right?!)

Where I work, we have a lot of Macs and quite a few of them do run Parallels with Win 7.

As a general 'rule of thumb', my opinion of the speed is, if you have a spinning Hard Drive, you need to give Parallels about 2 Gigs or more of RAM for it to be decent performance. If you have a SSD, you can get by with about 1.5 Gigs of RAM for Parallels. If you can give MORE Ram to Parallels than above, it gets better.

Obviously, if you have a 4 Gig RAM Mac, giving it half or more of the RAM to run Parallels puts a crimp in what else you can run.

But we have a few 2011 MB Airs (with 4 Gb RAM and an SSD) and they run Parallels / Win 7 just fine. Just don't expect to run a lot else at the same time.

My rule of thumb is if you're running VMs, you want to max your RAM.

Especially with the MBAs - with 4GB, you have to do something like a 2/2 split, which means you really aren't doing anything well.

I've been running Windows 7 for two years on my 2010 MBA 11". Works fine. Granted, I don't anything particularly intense on it. The usual Office-related stuff, web browsing, etc.

I have a 8 / 256 / 1.7 and installed Windows 7 EOM (which was cheaper than regular versions), Parallels 7, and Office and have not seen any slowdown of any kind.

I needed to have Windows Office for my sales program and other than less battery life, have seen nothing that raises a flag. I have set aside just under 2G for the Windows side and it seems to be more than fine.

Good luck!

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Slivortal said:

My rule of thumb is if you're running VMs, you want to max your RAM.

Especially with the MBAs - with 4GB, you have to do something like a 2/2 split, which means you really aren't doing anything well.

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I was told the same thing.....One of the main reasons I went with the 8. This is going to be my main computer and will need it for a few years to come.