going into engineering. help.

[woohoo]

I have a 2010 Macbook pro 15 inch, i7, 500gig, 4 ram. I am majoring in chemical engineering and I just really have two questions:

1. I have no idea what kinda of engineering programs I will be needing to run. All I know is most of them require windows according to my school. I was just wondering if I should just use bootcamp, just use VMware/Parallels, or should I use both? Is there any engineering program that would require all 4g of ram that bootcamp would probably be the better choice? I love Mac OS X and will be using it at all possible


2. The second questing is how much space will I need for these applications. I will not be adding games or anything to windows just the engineering programs and probably Microsoft office.
Thanks

 

[balamw]

There are plenty of us science/engineering types around here.

I have a number of apps that will take up all the RAM and are thus best run in Boot Camp, but I run my BC install in a VMWare Fusion VM all the time too.

I'll take MATLAB on OS X instead of Windows any day.

B

 

[Aerizon]

Matlab, Maple, Simulink, Labview are the more common programs.
Your university should offer these, but some don't have OS X versions so you still need windows. I don't really like matlab under OS X but that's just me. I don't stay in windows for a second after i'm done with coding, however.

I recommend using BC. Unless your code is really basic, rendering is going to take relatively longer under virtualisation. Heard the new version of VM is pretty good though. Test things out and see for yourself.

just for reference, my windows 7 partition is 100gb. just about half full now and i have all the above programs plus office and a few games.