question about rmbp and parallels

[Freyqq]

I do legal work, so a lot of writing, research, and reading PDFs. I'm planning on buying a rmbp 15", but I can't decide on how much ram to get. Since office 2011 is missing some features that I use a lot, I need to run parallels or vmware with office 2010 (PC). How much ram do you need to allocate to that vm, and how much ram do you recommend that I buy on the rmbp? Also, can I use bootcamp and have the vm work from that bootcamp partition? Thanks!

 

[ColdCase]

I do legal work, so a lot of writing, research, and reading PDFs. I'm planning on buying a rmbp 15", but I can't decide on how much ram to get. Since office 2011 is missing some features that I use a lot, I need to run parallels or vmware with office 2010 (PC). How much ram do you need to allocate to that vm, and how much ram do you recommend that I buy on the rmbp? Also, can I use bootcamp and have the vm work from that bootcamp partition? Thanks!

Bootcamp is OK if you want to boot into windoze or Mac OS but not both at the same time. They are two different PCs which you can only turn one on at a time.

A virtual machine like Parallels makes it easy to switch back and forth real time and share documents. Since you have a couple OSs running at the same time, it is RAM hungry.

I like parallels, between that, OS 10.8, and a few safari tabs with high web content.. you can easily use up 10GB ram. There is no allocation perse.

Since rMBP has soldering RAM (not upgradable) get 16GB (the max).

Bootcamp is not going to need as much RAM but I'd recommend getting 16GB RAM regardless of use.

 

[Asuriyan]

I can think of almost no reason to buy a rMBP with 8GB of RAM instead of 16, especially if you plan to use VMs.