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MBA - Parallels.

K

klaze

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 14, 2010
73
0
Hi, i have a question.

I have a late 2009 - white Macbook with 4 GB RAM. I allocated 2GB for Parallels and when I startup the Parallels (Win7), it was slow and choppy. Especially when I opened web browser, it loaded slow, and scrolling was so choppy. So I installed an extra 4GB RAM to allocate 4 GB RAM to Parallels instead of 2 GB RAM, and the speed was faster. Scrolling up and down on web browser was much smoother. Even the initial opening of the browser was quicker.

My question is that if I get MBA Ultimate, would the SSD compensate for having the 2GB RAM allocated to Parallels instead of 4GB RAM? Would the speed be as fast as having 4GB allocated to Parallels?

Thanks for the help.
 
Can't comment about running 2 gigs of ram with the Ultimate, but I have the 2010 Ultimate with 4 gigs of ram, 2 allocated to Windows and it runs very smoothly.
 
stockscalper said:
Can't comment about running 2 gigs of ram with the Ultimate, but I have the 2010 Ultimate with 4 gigs of ram, 2 allocated to Windows and it runs very smoothly.
Click to expand...

Okay thanks. I just didn't want it to run choppy like my white macbook. I'm thinking of getting MBA Ultimate.
 
klaze said:
Okay thanks. I just didn't want it to run choppy like my white macbook. I'm thinking of getting MBA Ultimate.
Click to expand...

You needed a lot more RAM than most to get smooth Windows computing. It makes me wonder why. Are there other apps you're running inside Windows that need more RAM? Do you have a current version of Parallels?

I would do more research and describe the situation and experiences with more details and seek more answers before spending the money and switching to an MBA with half the RAM.
 
Scottsdale said:
You needed a lot more RAM than most to get smooth Windows computing. It makes me wonder why. Are there other apps you're running inside Windows that need more RAM? Do you have a current version of Parallels?

I would do more research and describe the situation and experiences with more details and seek more answers before spending the money and switching to an MBA with half the RAM.
Click to expand...

I have Parallels 6.

I had nothing else opened. Just Parallels and OSX. Opening Chrome browser was slow with 2GB, but much faster with 4GB. Opening links, scrolling in browsers was much smoother.
 
I run windows 7 in parallels and only give it 1 GB of RAM, and the ssd i installed makes it work just fine for running MS office and chrome.

So yes, the SSD will help considerably.
 
Windows 7 runs just fine for me with 1.75GB and one CPU core allocated to it. Note that I tried running Parallels 6 with 2 CPU cores, and kept on getting kernel panics. The Genius Bar said everything was fine with the hardware. Parallels Support suggested running it with 1 core, and so far it works.
 
KPOM said:
Windows 7 runs just fine for me with 1.75GB and one CPU core allocated to it. Note that I tried running Parallels 6 with 2 CPU cores, and kept on getting kernel panics. The Genius Bar said everything was fine with the hardware. Parallels Support suggested running it with 1 core, and so far it works.
Click to expand...

I'm going to try and put 1 Core and see how it goes with 2GB RAM. Thanks.
 
You should not need to allocate 4GB of RAM to the VM to get decent performance, it should work okay with 1GB... so something else is probably going on.
 
I just tried 2GB RAM and 1 Core for Parallels, and it took 7 minutes to startup. Best result was the 4GB RAM and 2 Core.
 
Voondebah said:
I run windows 7 in parallels and only give it 1 GB of RAM, and the ssd i installed makes it work just fine for running MS office and chrome.

So yes, the SSD will help considerably.
Click to expand...

Is this on a MBA with 2GB of ram?
 
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