Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

psychotropic

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 28, 2008
121
0
Florida
I need to run SPSS (statistical software) on my mac for school. I have played around with the SPSS version on mac computers at the library and it is very buggy. I am thinking of getting either vmfusion or parallels to run Windows 7 and then getting SPSS PC versions that are much more proficient and effective. I purchased my Macbook Pro a couple weeks ago, but have not upgraded the ram from 4 to 8 gb yet. Can anyone provide me some opinions as to whether vmfusion or parallels works better, of it's personal preference? I know that either will work, so the most important information I need, is how much ram I should allocate to make sure that it runs smoothly? Should I wait till I am able to bump up to 8gbs before doing all this or what are your thoughts?

Thanks for helping out!
 
This is just a vague memory, so please excuse the lack of details. You should also confirm my impressions.

My wife had to run SPSS when she did her Masters a few years ago. I *believe" that there might have been some issues with SPSS then that made using it on a VM problematic. Check the SPSS support site... This was 4 - 5 years ago.

My wife has the student Mac edition for SPSS still, and says she finds it "limited" compared to the PC edition.

Hope this helps.
 
What version were you using? I'm running SPSS 18 (or rather, PASW Statistics as its called) on my 2011 macbook pro (13inch base model). Have found it to be great so far, though only just recently installed it. I don't see the point in running SPSS in parallels when the mac version is as good. As for RAM, depends what you'll be doing but unless you're crunching mad numbers I'm sure you won't stress the 4GB.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.