Macbook Air 13 2.5 Parallels Performance

[tey112]

I'm coming from the Early 2011 13" MBP 2.7 i7. I have always done a yearly upgrade (which comes out to be cheaper than every 4 years oddly enough), and the 2012 13" MBP 2.9 i7 is en route. But......

I mainly use my laptop to do some coding, run parallels 7/win 7 to run the off program that doesn't run on mac, and Hulu/Netflix/Reddit.

Do you guys think that the 13" Air i5 1.8 GHz with 8GB ram would be a good machine instead? I'm just worried that the air won't be able to run parallels and do other things at the same time.

The extra resolution compared to the 13" pro is tempting me a lot.

Thanks for the comments.

 

[ZBoater]

Yes, the MBA runs Parallels fine. I run this on my 2011 MBA with 4GB of RAM and it runs just fine.

I tried a 2012 MBA for a couple of days and found Parallels to be a bit "glitchy". They need to put out an update to support the new processors and video cards, which I am confident they will do in short order. I returned my 2012 MBA because I quite frankly couldn't tell the difference.

 

[tey112]

Holy..... that's a lot of VMs. Take it someone has an external hard drive. And nice on Windows 3.11.

I also stumbled across some other threads that mentioned Parallels runs fine (but with some software side glitches). Looks like I might be switching out the pro.

Any thoughts on how well the Air can run an external at the same time? The Early 2011 13" Pro 2.7ghz would sometimes get a little laggy with the built-in + 1920x1080 external. I guess the HD4000 would be bumping this up either way though.

 

[ZBoater]

Holy..... that's a lot of VMs. Take it someone has an external hard drive. And nice on Windows 3.11.

I also stumbled across some other threads that mentioned Parallels runs fine (but with some software side glitches). Looks like I might be switching out the pro.

Any thoughts on how well the Air can run an external at the same time? The Early 2011 13" Pro 2.7ghz would sometimes get a little laggy with the built-in + 1920x1080 external. I guess the HD4000 would be bumping this up either way though.

I'm pushing a Thunderbolt display at 2560 x 1440 plus the MBA screen at the same time. No lag or issues on the HD3000.

And all those VMs are on my 256GB SSD. Actually 200GB SSD, as I have Windows 7 on a 50GB partition in bootcamp.

 

[tey112]

Well that settles it, air it is. Time to return that and the SSD from Amazon.