Ram for parallels

[civilarac]

for light use of parallels, do you think 16gb ram is enough for smoothly experience?

model: MBP 16” M1 pro

 

[smirking]

for light use of parallels, do you think 16gb ram is enough for smoothly experience?

model: MBP 16” M1 pro

Yeah it should work. I had Windows for ARM running on Parallels on an 8GB M1 while I was running a bunch of memory hogging apps on the Mac side. I intentionally overloaded the machine to see if it would implode on me. Nothing on the Mac side missed a beat, but Windows was a little laggy.

 

[civilarac]

Yeah it should work. I had Windows for ARM running on Parallels on an 8GB M1 while I was running a bunch of memory hogging apps on the Mac side. I intentionally overloaded the machine to see if it would implode on me. Nothing on the Mac side missed a beat, but Windows was a little laggy.

When I have the parallels open, I’ll use the windows exclusively . I think the macOS won’t use too much ram, am I wrong?

 

[smirking]

When I have the parallels open, I’ll use the windows exclusively . I think the macOS won’t use too much ram, am I wrong?

It was actually fine when I was just using Windows normally with my Mac apps open. I tried to light everything on fire to see how it would do under load. I actually had Windows Update running at the same time.

When I wasn't trying to kill the laptop, it felt pretty normal to me and keep in mind, I was on an 8GB unit.

 

[bobcomer]

For only 1 VM, yep, 16G system RAM is enough -- you'd probably want to allocate 6G to the VM...

 

[chabig]

I used to run Windows 10 on an 8GB Mac. You don’t need much for light use.

 

[jlc1978]

I just ran Parallels on a 16GB MBP M1 base model with 4 cores of the 8 and 8GB dedicated to Parallels. Geekbench was 1548 and 5111, around 10% and 25% faster than my base M1 MBA.

 

[MikeDr206]

Ok, I’ll be the odd one out. On Macs with 16gb, and giving 4gb to windows for a 32-bit Win10 vm makes the rest of the Mac run choppy at times. This is with the vm running all the time. On my Mac Mini with 32 gb, no such issues. I typically give Windows 2 cores.

I use Windows solely to run Quicken Home & Business… once I upgrade to an M1 Mac, thinking of ditching Parallels and going with a Windows 365 Cloud PC to run QHB.

 

[jlc1978]

I get it but at $31 a month that's pretty step. You could buy a cheap PC and run it on there probably. If MS priced it so a small business like myself could afford it I'd give it a go but at $360/year that's out of teh picture since all I run is PowerBI. Parallels runs it fine so as long as MS continues with insider builds I have no need for a new machine. May prowl Goodwill etc. for an older Mini that can run Windows natively.