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Air and VM

basher

basher

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
May 27, 2011
576
139
Glendale, AZ USA
Since the top of the line Air has 4GB, is that enough to run Windows 7 via Parallels or Fusion? Anyone care to share their first hand VM experiences when using an Air?
 
basher said:
Since the top of the line Air has 4GB, is that enough to run Windows 7 via Parallels or Fusion? Anyone care to share their first hand VM experiences when using an Air?
Click to expand...

There are lots of threads about it here and in the Windows on Mac forum. I run Win 7 in Parallels and it runs just fine.
 
I have the base 2011 13". Windows 7 Ultimate runs wonderfully via Parallels. Coherence mode or normal mode. :apple:
 
I have the i7 4GB, using VirtualBox (free) works great booting Windows 7 from the Boot Camp partition, takes a bit of steps to get it to work, but it works pretty well. I also have Parallels, which also boots from the Boot Camp partition, which works great too.

Just make sure when you suspend or save states on these VM programs, dont actually Boot natively into Windows, it appears to screw up the Windows Volume, and it ended up running chkdsk. No problems were found, but just a caution.
 
This is my first Mac and my first experience with VMs. I am very, very impressed with how seamless Parallels makes the whole experience. Performance is also very good. While running my Windows apps (Quicken, DVD Profiler, Escort Radar Detector Updater) I can continue to run my Lion apps with no apparent ill effect. Coherence mode in Parallels is thing of beauty. It makes the Windows apps run as if they were native in Lion.

Just for giggles I created several other VMs; two for Windows XP, one for Windows 98, one for DOS, and one for Ubuntu. Sorry to say Parallels doesn't support DOS and Windows 98 very well. Dosbox ended up being a better solution for me to run Zork... :cool:
 
ZBoater said:
This is my first Mac and my first experience with VMs. I am very, very impressed with how seamless Parallels makes the whole experience. Performance is also very good. While running my Windows apps (Quicken, DVD Profiler, Escort Radar Detector Updater) I can continue to run my Lion apps with no apparent ill effect. Coherence mode in Parallels is thing of beauty. It makes the Windows apps run as if they were native in Lion.

Just for giggles I created several other VMs; two for Windows XP, one for Windows 98, one for DOS, and one for Ubuntu. Sorry to say Parallels doesn't support DOS and Windows 98 very well. Dosbox ended up being a better solution for me to run Zork... :cool:
Click to expand...

Geek! :D

:apple:
 
ZBoater said:
Just for giggles I created several other VMs; two for Windows XP, one for Windows 98, one for DOS, and one for Ubuntu. Sorry to say Parallels doesn't support DOS and Windows 98 very well. Dosbox ended up being a better solution for me to run Zork... :cool:
Click to expand...

Zork! I remember that game well. Even the HD 3000 can handle that one. :D

I have the following operating systems installed on my 11" i7:
- Lion (obviously)
- Snow Leopard Server (running in Parallels)
- Windows 7 Pro 64-bit (Boot Camp with a VM in Parallels)
- Windows XP (XP Mode within Windows 7).

XP mode has come in handy as I found an old hard drive the last time I was at my parents'. It was in a USB enclosure (so I had some foresight when I got rid of the computer), and it had some files from an old scanner that I managed to find software for. I'll see if there is anything worthwhile in that old data. I found an even older hard drive (a whopping 512MB), but unfortunately there was nothing readable on it. It would have been interesting had I found some old term papers from high school or college.
 
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