13" i7 Pro, looking at Ultimate Air,HELP!

[GadgetGeek407]

I have a 13" i7 Pro and I basically own a used car business so I upload a lot HD pics of cars, multiple internet windows, chat, FaceTime, Skype, and more importantly I use VMWare Fusion to run Windows which is only for a small software that prints all my dealer paperwork.

The sad part is that on this machine whenever I run the VM it always slows the entire machine down SO bad, I am wondering how much better off I am getting the ultimate 13 AIR considering I didn't jump the gun last year cause of lack of BLK, but the ONLY thing that kinda disappoints me is WHY they didn't give a 8gb option, where would I be losing out with this new machine in comparison to what i have now?


Thanks gang

 

[alust2013]

Perhaps an 8GB upgrade would be a good idea for your current machine. VMs suck up a lot of memory.

 

[GadgetGeek407]

I really like the thought of carrying the light weight around actually. But an SSD on my machine and a 8gb upgrade would make this thing a ROCKET!

 

[NCMac]

How do you have your VMware resources defined? I run a Win7 VMware image just fine on my 2011 13" i7. I only give Windows 1 GB of memory and 1 core, but I only run 2 applications in that environment at a time.

While my VM enviroment is running I do not see any perceived slowdown on the rest of my system. I will use more CPU however and the system occasionally causes the fans to become slightly audible, but this is only when I run a higher workload on the VM side which is not often, but thats why I got the i7 anyway

 

[Obscurelight]

I would say try to et your ram upgrade instead of going for the air. It seems like you might be in need of more power than going backwards

 

[GadgetGeek407]

if I have my VM already setup, cause I left it stock, can i redefine it? AHHHH i WANT the new air more than I NEED it lol

 

[NCMac]

Yes you can most certainly reallocate processor and memory for your VM. Windows may complain and force you to re-activate the license which has happened to me, but you can tweak the settings to find the right balance between the host and the VM.

 

[PaulWog]

Note that the camera on the Macbook Air is not a FaceTime HD camera. It's just a FaceTime camera. You may want to take this into consideration, if you're using Skype.

 

[Samwise13]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

I'd recommend the air. I got an ultimate 13. But if you upgrade your current ram, try crucial, I found 8 gigs for my moms MacBook pro for ~70$...

 

[riggers]

The sad part is that on this machine whenever I run the VM it always slows the entire machine down SO bad, I am wondering how much better off I am getting the ultimate 13 AIR considering I didn't jump the gun last year cause of lack of BLK, but the ONLY thing that kinda disappoints me is WHY they didn't give a 8gb option, where would I be losing out with this new machine in comparison to what i have now?


Thanks gang

I would give VirtualBox or Parallels a spin to see if the performance jumps at all, in my use Fusion was a dog of a performer but everyone's VM is different...

 

[KPOM]

I have a 13" i7 Pro and I basically own a used car business so I upload a lot HD pics of cars, multiple internet windows, chat, FaceTime, Skype, and more importantly I use VMWare Fusion to run Windows which is only for a small software that prints all my dealer paperwork.

The sad part is that on this machine whenever I run the VM it always slows the entire machine down SO bad, I am wondering how much better off I am getting the ultimate 13 AIR considering I didn't jump the gun last year cause of lack of BLK, but the ONLY thing that kinda disappoints me is WHY they didn't give a 8gb option, where would I be losing out with this new machine in comparison to what i have now?


Thanks gang

Since you already have an i7 13" Pro, I'd suggest bumping up the RAM and picking up a decent third party SSD for your Pro, rather than going to an Air. It will be more cost effective for your small business since you'll take a big hit on a 4-month old notebook. It will be faster, so the only thing you'll miss out on is the smaller size. There are workarounds out there to get TRIM working on a third party SSD.

I have used both Fusion and Parallels Desktop, and settled on Parallels Desktop because it has had better performance in my experience. I used it over the weekend on my new i7 MacBook Air with 1.75GB and it ran Quicken pretty speedily. I suspect with 3-4GB out of 8GB allocated to it, it should be pretty quick.