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Capt. Morgan

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 16, 2008
41
0
Realizing that the MBA has yet to hit the street, is anyone running Parallels or Fusion on a 1.6 ghz machine? Is the performance tolerable? What are the memory requirements? Fortunately, the only thing I would need Windows for is checking into certain areas of my company's website using IE.
 

aosman

macrumors 6502
Jan 19, 2008
251
0
I would guess that the MBA should run a stripped down version of XP pretty nicely considering you only need IE.
 

nuclearwinter

macrumors regular
Nov 3, 2003
208
0
Milky Way
If configured with the SSD, Fusion or Parallels will run just fine. Space might an issue though. Running Fusion and Parallels on my Mac Mini 1.5 Core Solo with 2GB RAM works just fine for everyday use.
 

MarlboroLite

macrumors 6502a
Oct 29, 2007
581
5
the 13 colonies
Not necessarily about the MBA but in general, how much do people recommend to hard drive space to the windows partition for basic stuff like outlook, office 2007, explorer etc?
 

Carrot007

macrumors regular
Sep 18, 2006
209
0
Yorkshire
Should be fine, windows runs fine under fusion on my 1gb core solo mini! (though you really don't want to do much else alongside it!) so it will be much better on the MBA. Probably as nice as it is on my 1st gen 1.83 coro duo macbook (2gb) given the speed advances with the newer cpu in the air, on which it runs great.

As for space. For an XP installation 10GB is ok to play with and 20gb for vista ( use XP it's the sensible choice!). Though remember if you are using a virtual hard drive the size you choose for the max is not as relevant as it will only be as large as the actual used space, eg. my xp fusion VM is 3.4gb and my HD size for it is 10gb.
 

tersono

macrumors 68000
Jan 18, 2005
1,999
1
UK
Not necessarily about the MBA but in general, how much do people recommend to hard drive space to the windows partition for basic stuff like outlook, office 2007, explorer etc?

If running XP 20gb should be just fine - you can make do with less, but I'd suggest sticking to 20 as a workable minimum (it's what I use on my XP partition at work). If you can afford a little more, so much the better.

If, however, you're going for Vista, then 40gb is the minimum requirement.
 

jhande

macrumors 6502
Sep 20, 2006
305
0
Denmark
Realizing that the MBA has yet to hit the street, is anyone running Parallels or Fusion on a 1.6 ghz machine? Is the performance tolerable? What are the memory requirements? Fortunately, the only thing I would need Windows for is checking into certain areas of my company's website using IE.

Given that I'm running Win2K and XP on a CD MacBook with 2 GB, you shouldn't have any problems.
 

etorres

macrumors member
May 26, 2007
53
0
The most important factor is not the CPU, as ANY core 2 duo out there is much more than enough to run windows. Memory is the most important factor, but with 2 Gb it should be more than enough. I have an iMac with 2 Gb and I use windows xp under VmWare fusion. I partition my memory with 512 mb for win xP and 1.5 Gb for OS X, without any problems whatsoever. Win xP runs just fine with 512 mb of ram allocated, if you want more then just split the memory with 1 Gb of RAM allocated to each OS.
I wouldnt recommend Vista as it is resource hog that will consume most of your ram just for basic system resources without much direct benefit to you. So use windows xP instead.
With this in mind the macbook air should be more then capable of handling windows under parallels or vmware.
 

Dustman

macrumors 65816
Apr 17, 2007
1,381
238
...is this thread a joke? If PowerPC macs were sufficient to run windows with VirtualPC through emulation, why wouldn't a Core 2 Duo be up to the task? For future reference, the system requirements for XP are;

233 Mhz Pentium or equivalent processor
64 MB of ram, 128 MB recommended
1.5 GBs Hard Disk space
800 x 600 or higher-resolution video adapter and monitor
 
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