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Macbook Air and windows 7

J

jmfel1926

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 22, 2012
74
0
Hello to everyone,

i am about to buy a Macbook Air 2012 11'' with 4gb of Ram and i was wondering , will i be capable to run windows 7 with 4gb? i am a light user but i want to run windows 7 when i need them ... from the store they told that ofcourse 8gb are better but i will not have problem with 4gb whatever i do . i am a light user , maybe sometimes a little bit more of a light user. i don't want to play games on windows 7 , just for some programs.
 
4G with Win 7 32 bit, boot-camp or OSX with parallels or vmware will work just fine
 
It will run Windows 7 fine. If you get an ISO of the Windows install DVD, you can create a bootable installer USB drive right by using BootCamp Assistant.
 
Really? I had read in numerous posts here that 8GB is recommended if we're gonna run Windows in a VM (like Parallels, etc).

So which is true? 4GB or 8GB ??
 
Sounds Good said:
Really? I had read in numerous posts here that 8GB is recommended if we're gonna run Windows in a VM (like Parallels, etc).

So which is true? 4GB or 8GB ??
Click to expand...

It will run decently with a 4GB system. I've been doing that since 2010. However, it will run better on an 8GB system because you can allocate the VM more memory while still reserving more memory for OS X.

What I found is that with 4GB, I could comfortably allocate 1.5GB of RAM to Windows 7, which was enough to run 1-2 programs before Windows started paging excessively. If I started running a few tabs in Safari or had iTunes in the background, I'd start running out of memory in OS X. With 8GB, I can give Windows 3GB (significantly reducing page-outs), and still have 5GB of RAM left over for OS X, which eliminates the issue I experienced before.
 
KPOM said:
It will run decently with a 4GB system. I've been doing that since 2010. However, it will run better on an 8GB system because you can allocate the VM more memory while still reserving more memory for OS X.

What I found is that with 4GB, I could comfortably allocate 1.5GB of RAM to Windows 7, which was enough to run 1-2 programs before Windows started paging excessively. If I started running a few tabs in Safari or had iTunes in the background, I'd start running out of memory in OS X. With 8GB, I can give Windows 3GB (significantly reducing page-outs), and still have 5GB of RAM left over for OS X, which eliminates the issue I experienced before.
Click to expand...

How does this allocation work with bootcamp? Do you have to allocate? I thought it was whichever one (windows of mac os) you bootup will get all the RAM?
 
yoyoma1992 said:
How does this allocation work with bootcamp? Do you have to allocate? I thought it was whichever one (windows of mac os) you bootup will get all the RAM?
Click to expand...

With Boot Camp, Windows has access to however much RAM your Mac has. You choose at the time of booting whether to run OS X or Windows. If you boot into Windows, it is no different from any other Windows PC.
 
I have been using Parallels/Win7 on a MBA w/ 4GB for a year

Of course this all depends on what you are doing. If you are doing gaming on a virtual machine it might get pretty rough for a variety of reasons. But I wouldn't know because I don't do that. I run Office 2010 on Win 7 on Paralless 7. I also run MindJet mind mapping software, Evernote, Internet Explorer. I typically use it in "coherence" mode so that you don't see the Windows desktop, just the Windows (e.g. Office 2010) apps running on your OSX desktop. I have even run with the Windows virtual machine on an Elgato SSD Thunderbolt drive so I could move it from one Mac to the next. And sometimes I don't run in Coherence mode and put Parallels/Windows in full screen mode in its own virtual desktop. When it is on my Thunderbolt display it is pretty slick.

Of course all of that was on a 2011 MBA 13" (I have been doing it since last August.)

If I have a problem using Windows on my Mac it is that there are a couple of keys that don't map well (Delete) and I have grown so accustomed to using gestures in Mac OSX that I really miss them when I am in Windows. So no I use Office 2011 on OSX as much as possible. (And, yes, I can have an Outlook 2011 window open and an Outlook 2010 window open in Coherence mode and side by side and I can see changes I make in one eventually get reflected in the other as they independently sync with Exchange.)
 
How does the Bootcamp RAM allocation work? You give some % of the RAM to bootcamp so Windows can use that? Is the allocated RAM still free in use for OSX when you're not booted to Windows?
 
jeremyx said:
How does the Bootcamp RAM allocation work? You give some % of the RAM to bootcamp so Windows can use that? Is the allocated RAM still free in use for OSX when you're not booted to Windows?
Click to expand...

If you are not booted into Windows, it doesn't take any ram.
 
If you want to run Windows as a VM via Parallels or VM Ware Fusion, I'd highly recommend 8Gb RAM. If running Windows via Bootcamp 4gb would probably be okay, though I still think its almost a non-brainer now to configure a new MBA with 8Gb - it's not that expensive to do and you can't upgrade it later.
 
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