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I screwed up [Replacing 21" with 27" due to performance issues]

noobinator

noobinator

macrumors 604
Original poster
Jun 19, 2009
7,417
7,135
Los Angeles, CA
I thought a base 21 would be good enough for me but having owned my new iMac over a month now I can safely say I messed up. I use Parallels with Windows 7 and do photo editing in LightRoom 4. I was convinced this would be enough. Having spent the last month watching the beachball spin I have no problems saying I got the wrong machine.

Almost everyday it gets stuck to the point of a hard reset. I took it into Apple and of course I could not replicate the problem. The Apple guy told me what I know that I probably need more RAM. I'll be selling this and getting a 27" with a Fusion drive and I'll probably max out the RAM.

My lesson learned is that I am an idiot you should always get more than you need if you are not sure and can afford it. I'm thinking I will lose 200-300 by selling a 1 month old iMac? Anyone else feel my pain or make a similar mistake?
 
I use my 2 year old base iMac with 12 gb ram and Lightroom 4 everyday and it works great.
 
The 8gb should be enough to run what you've got. How do you have Parallels configured? Do you have to run Windows all the time? When I run Parallels with Windows, it's the only time I get close to using all my RAM.

If you fire up activity monitor, what does it show for memory and processor usage during your normal workload?
 
That Sucks ! Sorry to hear that. try ebay now ! like right now ! while people still think the wait is long on the BTO's
 
glenthompson said:
The 8gb should be enough to run what you've got. How do you have Parallels configured? Do you have to run Windows all the time? When I run Parallels with Windows, it's the only time I get close to using all my RAM.

If you fire up activity monitor, what does it show for memory and processor usage during your normal workload?
Click to expand...

I configured parallels to use 4gb because I play games on windows. When I'm done I just hit suspend. How should I configure it?
 
Easiest way would be to run Lightroom on OSX instead of Windows, if you have LR on disk it includes the OSX version, if not you can get a backup disk for about $14.00 from Adobe, just order it for OSX. If you are using anything other then LR 4 just upgrade and get it in OSX.
 
seniorgeek said:
Easiest way would be to run Lightroom on OSX instead of Windows, if you have LR on disk it includes the OSX version, if not you can get a backup disk for about $14.00 from Adobe, just order it for OSX. If you are using anything other then LR 4 just upgrade and get it in OSX.
Click to expand...

I do use LR in OSX. i only play games in windows.
 
noobinator said:
I configured parallels to use 4gb because I play games on windows. When I'm done I just hit suspend. How should I configure it?
Click to expand...

I only use 3gb but I'm running XP. Lightroom will be slow if running it at the same time as Win7 but with the VM suspended, it should run fine.

Just cranked up my VM to check some of the settings and it was a little slow due to Windows downloading and installing updates. I'm currently on a marginal speed net connection so anything internet related was really affected.
 
WilliamG said:
Good luck with that, even on the 27". Some games cause Parallels to just plain crash the OS! And I have a maxed out 27" with 32GB!

If you're even sort-of serious about gaming = Boot Camp.
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The games i play are really old so i doubt bootcamp would be much different. I'm talking over 5 years old. I am old school!
 
It's not a machine error, it's a user error. The virtual machine cannot do what you are asking it to do, the iMac is more than capable. Completely remove the virtual machine and run a boot camp partition. Even my old 2010 27" iMac was capable of anything I asked of it with 8gb of ram, my new 21" 2.5 i5 is faster with the original 4gb of ram before I upgraded it than my old 27" 2.8 i5 at 8gb primarily thanks to better graphics card and more Vram. There is nothing a newer iMac won't handle for any reasonably average user. You have to be getting into some things you won't as a casual gamer of older stuff to trip up a newer iMac. Set it up correctly and let the iMac show you it's guts. You are bottlenecking everything into a horrible virtual drive. It's not the machines fault.
 
I don't think you will see much difference between a base model 21 and 27" for what you are doing, unless there is some hardware problem with your 21.


B
 
bernuli said:
I don't think you will see much difference between a base model 21 and 27" for what you are doing, unless there is some hardware problem with your 21.


B
Click to expand...

Agreed. That said, the fusion drive is a huge difference on the SSD portion...
 
I have 16gb in my 2 year old base model and it runs LR and PS at the same time with no issues.

I use fusion and regularly run windows 7 and XP clients without issue as well but I don't play modern games in them.
 
I think you made a good choice getting a better 27" imac with hardware. Just accept it as a lesson, parallels, gaming and Lightroom isn't light use if the machine, it requires some power. So at least a medium strength iMac is required. Though your beach ball problem could be parallel or Lightroom has been set up to allocate a certain amount of ram under preferences.

Don't get more than 8gb ram from apple. Upgrading ram on the 27" is easy and ram is dead cheap outside of apple.

Since you play games through parallels I would recommend the 680mx gfx card. I run parallel through mine and every game I played so far I can run on highest settings without any lag.
 
@noobinator. With your base 21" iMac you could have tried reformatting and doing a clean reinstall of OSX and see if the beachball problem still occurs. But on the bright side, you have a better 27" iMac. Sort of a blessing in disguise. Enjoy your new machine!
 
I have a newbie question: you can install a application/game on mac OS and in windows7 through bootcamp ?
 
Serban said:
I have a newbie question: you can install a application/game on mac OS and in windows7 through bootcamp ?
Click to expand...

Any application that will run under windows will run on a Mac when booted into windows using bootcamp. At that point it's just a better looking PC. Using a virtual machine like Parallels or VMware can pose problems with a few apps or games. I don't do games and haven't run into a problem with any Windows apps under Parallels.
 
Sry i didn't put it right. Can i have the same application on both mac os and windows simultaneous ?
 
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