Need 8gb RAM for Parallels6/VMWare Fusion on 15" MBP i5?

[pjny]

My friend wants to know if he needs to upgrade from 4gb to 8gb on a 15" mac book pro i7, 2.2ghz, 5400rpm drive using Parallels 6 or VMWare Fusion for Windows 7 install.

He was not happy with the speed of VMWare Fusion and was planning on buying Parallels 6 along with memory upgrade from Crucial. Does he need 8gb of RAM or is that overkill?

He only needs to run one program( SAS Business Analytics software ) on Parallels.

He had already ordered OWC 6g SSD Mercury Extreme with data doubler.

Thanks/

Thanks.

 

[mobilehaathi]

Need? No, but it will definitely help.

 

[mgartner0622]

4GB will work fine, unless you plan to be running multiple Applications both in Windows and Mac OS at the same time. That's when you start needing 6 or 8GB.

 

[DWBurke811]

i've found vmware to be faster than parallels, and i have 4gb of ram

 

[tcador]

Fusion is VERY slow on my old C2D (4GB, 5400rpm hd) compared to my new MBP that has SSD + 8GB. Of course this is expected being it's 3 years newer, however my guess is that it's the SSD, not the memory, that made the difference.

Point I'm getting at is he might not see the expected speed difference that he's after by switching to Parallels.

 

[hehe299792458]

On my old 2008 MBP, VMware was basically unusable. Traditional hard disks can't handle two OS's running at the same time. When I switched to an SSD, the performance increased dramatically. However, no such dramatic increase accompanied my increase in ram