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capitalst

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 4, 2009
14
0
I have a new Macbook Pro 13 the other day with 2.4ghz with 4gb RAM. I was expecting it to be night and day from my 2 year old Macbook with only 2gb of RAM. If I upgrade to 8gb of RAM would I see a big improvement in performance when running both Windows and OSX or will it be very little given its a Core 2 Duo still and not Quad??
 

balamw

Moderator emeritus
Aug 16, 2005
19,366
979
New England
I have a new Macbook Pro 13 the other day with 2.4ghz with 4gb RAM. I was expecting it to be night and day from my 2 year old Macbook with only 2gb of RAM. If I upgrade to 8gb of RAM would I see a big improvement in performance when running both Windows and OSX or will it be very little given its a Core 2 Duo still and not Quad??

What are you doing in OS X and Windows? For me, things are relatively smooth by the time I allocate 2 GB to the VM and allow the rest for OS X. Of course it will be better with 8GB, but probably not night and day.

Are you allocating at least 2GB for the Windows VM?

B
 

ayeying

macrumors 601
Dec 5, 2007
4,547
13
Yay Area, CA
You're still bottlenecked by your Hard Drive. VMware Fusion is highly dependent on the hard drive. It's actually higher in the priority then Ram.
 

balamw

Moderator emeritus
Aug 16, 2005
19,366
979
New England
You're still bottlenecked by your Hard Drive. VMware Fusion is highly dependent on the hard drive. It's actually higher in the priority then Ram.
Yeah, I was going to say that maybe an SSD might be a better investment than an additional 4GB, but first we need to understand that the OP isn't doing something stupid, like allocating <1 or >3 GB of RAM to the VM or giving it two cores and running processor intensive stuff. You know the basics.

B
 

seventy9ers

macrumors newbie
Apr 13, 2010
23
0
I have a new Macbook Pro 13 the other day with 2.4ghz with 4gb RAM. I was expecting it to be night and day from my 2 year old Macbook with only 2gb of RAM. If I upgrade to 8gb of RAM would I see a big improvement in performance when running both Windows and OSX or will it be very little given its a Core 2 Duo still and not Quad??

Lol.. I'm in the same boat as you are. I sold my 3yr old white macbook with 2gb RAM, and went all the way to 15" MBP i7 with 4gb expecting a huge improvement in performance for running windows using VMWARE... Wrong...

There are several things you can do to make things run smoother, such as turning off aero theme in windows 7, and so on. But yeah, the 7200rpm or SSD would be the better upgrade from what I've heard.
 
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