Virtual Machines w/ Rev. B SSD

[ayeying]

Hey. I would like some input on the current Rev. B/SSD owners.

How does virtual machines run, specifically Windows XP Professional SP3?

My cousin is thinking about purchasing the Rev B SSD model but he requires Windows XP for work purposes. He won't be running much, just some basic software. I run a Vista virtual machine on my current 17" and it tends to studder a little sometimes.

[Maven1975]

Hey. I would like some input on the current Rev. B/SSD owners.

How does virtual machines run, specifically Windows XP Professional SP3?

My cousin is thinking about purchasing the Rev B SSD model but he requires Windows XP for work purposes. He won't be running much, just some basic software. I run a Vista virtual machine on my current 17" and it tends to studder a little sometimes.

Fast and flawlessly in VMware.

[Scottsdale]

XP is known for being a smaller better OS than Vista. I had a MBP and ran XP on it with Fusion and via Boot Camp. It ran really nicely. I had a rev B MBA with SSD, and it was faster than the MBP. I cannot imagine that the MBA would have any problems with XP virtually. In fact, XP requires less RAM than Vista, so it would do better in a virtual environment with shared memory. Lastly, XP takes up less drive space, and with an MBA space is limited; therefore XP would be a way to conserve the limited drive space.

My two cents.

[rhyx]

I use XP inside of VMWare just fine. I only allocate one processor and 512MB RAM though.

[happyslayer]

I run XP SP3 with Parallels 4.0 on my Rev B (1.86 with SSD). 8GB Partition, 1GB RAM, 1CPU, 64MB video. Runs really really well. Other than XP and its updates, I only run Office 2003.

Good luck!

[Constantinos]

Same good experiences here, with Rev B (1.86 / SSD) and Parallels 4.0 running xp sp3 / office 2003. I keep the virtual machine almost always available on a different Space, having allocated 1 GB of RAM to it. I think that Parallels is doing some intelligent management of allocated memory because there seems to be no significant impact on performance when working under OS X with the virtual machine open.

[Scottsdale]

Same good experiences here, with Rev B (1.86 / SSD) and Parallels 4.0 running xp sp3 / office 2003. I keep the virtual machine almost always available on a different Space, having allocated 1 GB of RAM to it. I think that Parallels is doing some intelligent management of allocated memory because there seems to be no significant impact on performance when working under OS X with the virtual machine open.

I always feared installing Windows on my rev B MBA. I didn't want to take up drive space. I also didn't want to do the virtual route because with only 2 GB of RAM, sharing RAM seems like it would slow down OS X.

Nice to hear that it is fine running Parallels all of the time. Hopefully the rev C MBA will have 4 GB of RAM and sharing 1 GB will seem less problematic. Until then, I guess it's not as big of a deal as it once seemed. I have a feeling the 1066 MHz RAM is really quick compared to the old 667 MHz RAM???

I had always noticed with my rev B MBA that I never needed more RAM than the 2 GB. While a lot of people, including myself, complain that the MBA should have 4 GB of RAM, it's probably not as necessary as one might think...

[dehory]

I always feared installing Windows on my rev B MBA. I didn't want to take up drive space. I also didn't want to do the virtual route because with only 2 GB of RAM, sharing RAM seems like it would slow down OS X.

Nice to hear that it is fine running Parallels all of the time. Hopefully the rev C MBA will have 4 GB of RAM and sharing 1 GB will seem less problematic. Until then, I guess it's not as big of a deal as it once seemed. I have a feeling the 1066 MHz RAM is really quick compared to the old 667 MHz RAM???

I had always noticed with my rev B MBA that I never needed more RAM than the 2 GB. While a lot of people, including myself, complain that the MBA should have 4 GB of RAM, it's probably not as necessary as one might think...

In terms of space, I've only allocated 5 GB for my Tiny XP installation to run things like Sopcast which I can't find equivalents for in OS X.

Tiny XP runs well through Fusion -- surprisingly so for me, given the less-than-generous RAM in the Rev. B. Splitting RAM/processor, there are no delays in OS X and XP runs fairly smoothly depending what I'm doing.