Mac air for parallel

I've been using Parallels 8 with Windows 7 on my 11" Macbook Air (1.6 GHz i5, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD) for a couple of weeks now, and it works just fine. I use it for Office only, as the Mac version is a buggy, crashy pile of crap.

It's a little slower than a native PC, and you'll want to play around with the Parallels settings to assign the right amount of memory and CPU to Windows, but you should be good. I run mine in Convergence mode most of the time.

Parallels and Windows 7 took about 30GB of hard drive space, I think - 731 for Parallels and 28.63GB for the Windows virtual machine.

However I don't think Parallels 8 supports Windows 8 yet.

Yeah 128 would be fine for your needs. You're looking at 15-25 GB for a fully updated office install and windows install. Set aside 60 just to be safe in care you do other programs later.

Convergence is when Parallels lets you run Windows apps invisibly in OS X - you don't know Windows is running, except for the Windows apps retain their Windows appearance, title bars, etc. I have Word, Excel and Powerpoint sitting in my Dock just like they're Mac apps.

I didn't assign anything - I ran Parallels, installed Windows, installed Office. I knew it would take around 30GB so I just made sure I had that much free space.

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seedzeng said:

How much space does a 128gb mac really offer after mac os?

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Well... my system folder is 5.56GB, my library folder is 3.93GB, my applications folder is 30.08GB (21GB of that is World of Warcraft). My users folder is at 66GB but I've got a bunch of videos in there. I have three external drives for bulk storage, though.

I have a 128GB air running Mountain Lion and Windows 7. It works, but honestly, it's a bit tight, and I'm sure I'm missing out on a good bit of SSD performance by having so little free space left. I'm on a 2010 so due for an upgrade, just need to stretch it out until the Haswell models come out, then I'll be going with 512GB.

zen said:

I've been using Parallels 8 with Windows 7 on my 11" Macbook Air (1.6 GHz i5, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD) for a couple of weeks now, and it works just fine. I use it for Office only, as the Mac version is a buggy, crashy pile of crap.

It's a little slower than a native PC, and you'll want to play around with the Parallels settings to assign the right amount of memory and CPU to Windows, but you should be good. I run mine in Convergence mode most of the time.

Parallels and Windows 7 took about 30GB of hard drive space, I think - 731 for Parallels and 28.63GB for the Windows virtual machine.

However I don't think Parallels 8 supports Windows 8 yet.

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Yep it supports well...but win8 is (to me) is crashy pile of c****

thasan said:

Yep it supports well...but win8 is (to me) is crashy pile of c****

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Sounds like it doesn't support it all that well. I'm not a fan of Windows 8 (much prefer 7) but I've installed it on a few machines and it's been rock solid. I only wish I didn't hate the interface so much.

Sure works fine for me, i've got plenty of space left too to be honest. Depends how much space you need really, but if you're not a HD monster and use external drives/cloud/BTMM etc then the OS and Parallels don't take up that much space.

You could try Windows 7 "Lite". It took me 5GB total including Office 2007 installed. Very small footprint compared to the complete version.

2IS said:

Sounds like it doesn't support it all that well. I'm not a fan of Windows 8 (much prefer 7) but I've installed it on a few machines and it's been rock solid. I only wish I didn't hate the interface so much.

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sorry if i mislead. it works fine. never crashed. but the interface...i just couldnt get used to it even though i tried with an open mind. for me, its just more clicks to get the same things done. not my way. thats why the piece of c comment...

I was just messing with Parallel on my 2012 13" 1.8GHz 128GB.
I put Windows 8 on there, runs fine.
What's shocking is I ran Arkham Asylum near flawlessly through steam, through Windows 8, through Parallel. At a resolution of 1920x1080. I was pretty shocked.
So yeah, you'll be fine to run what you want to run.

I ran Parallels with Windows 7 on an MBP with a 128gb drive. Yes, it's doable but I felt like I was firefighting to keep a reasonable amount of space free for other things. This time round I got an Air with 256gb drive, it's a much better fit. If you can stretch to the larger drive I would recommend it.

I run virtualbox(http://www.virtualbox.org) from Oracle and its free.

I run Windows 7 and 8, Linux, Win Servers etc with no issues except for attaching USB devices which is buggy. I just attach it to the host OS and then share it with the guest for now.

Regarding MBA, I have 8 GB RAM but with a dual core CPU I can only give the VM two cores so I went Bootcamp as I run some intensive tasks in my MBA (SQL Server, VS etc).

But for light office work it should work fine.

Think about it, few years ago all we had was dual core CPU's in laptops and people still worked with it.

Update :
After seeing as how my virtual machine was very zippy and fast(probably the SSD), I deleted my bootcamp partition to get back the space and I think I can make it with the virtual machines on my MBA.