Win7 on a new 2011 13" MBA: BootCamp vs. Fusion/Parallels

[unixperience]

Pardon me for being dense, but is there a reason why so many people here apparently prefer to run Office on Windows bootcamped from OSX, rather than install Office for Mac? I am using the latter, and to be honest, the only thing stopping me from jumping ship to Iworks is the fact my entire workplace use office, and I don't wish to risk compatibility issues. Something is very wrong with the software when Word can hang on an Imac with 8gb ram.

just adding to what people said, but the mac version of most office applications is not as user friendly as windows is. Especially if you are familiar with windows version at work or school or otherwise. The mac office suite is far more limited than the windows suite. I have approximately 11 different programs (i may only use 5 though) under the windows office suite (and theirs even more I don't have) for mac you get excel, word, ppt, and if you are lucky, outlook. Windows has far more than those. Lastly and most importantly, anyone who uses excel knows there is no replacement for the windows version (especially the 2011 mac release)/ The mac version is unstable and crashes often, has trouble processing data and doesn't always save (read any reviews of 2011 for mac), for me thats the deal breaker, I can replace just about any other of the programs, but I use excel daily, theres no alternative to the windows version

 

[monkeybagel]

I am using Lion with a 2011 MBA 13" i5 and VMware Fusion 3.0.3 and it works fine with Windows 7 Enterprise x64 and Office 2010 x64.

 

[MyopicPaideia]

I am having great results using my 11" MBA for work, using Fusion 3.0.3 and a 64 bit Win7 Ultimate VM to VPN to access our remote Accounting suite via Remote Desktop and to remote print to our invoices to our bank for electronic invoicing.

My installation uses the default settings in VMware Fusion, and that means 1 GB RAM and 1 core. It runs superbly and there is no slow down at all on the Mac side that I use everything else for. Windows reports WIE of 4.5, and that's the RAM performance. This is because it is forced to use virtual memory more than if I were to allocate more to the VM. Hard disk perormance hits the tops score at 7.9, and Desktop graphics performance is rated at 5.9.

For productivity software, this is far more than required for smooth performance.

My two cents...

 

[orfeas0]

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I have a similar question. Will the BASIC 11" mba (2gb ram) be able to run vmware/parallels smoothly for:
1) ubuntu
2) windows ?
Also, can i use boot camp to have 3 partitions instead of 2?

 

[ZipZap]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

I have a similar question. Will the BASIC 11" mba (2gb ram) be able to run vmware/parallels smoothly for:
1) ubuntu
2) windows ?
Also, can i use boot camp to have 3 partitions instead of 2?

Yes...I only have 2GB on my MBA and use Parallels 7. Next time, I will go with the larger memory choice on my MBA.

 

[rdlink]

I have a 2011 MBA 13", completely upgraded. i7, 4GB RAM, 256 storage. To start out, I would recommend running a VM. Bootcamp is nice, but the hassle of rebooting to the separate partition is not worth it to work in MS Office, IMO.

I have run VMWare fusion for the last three years on various Macs (MB 13", MBP 15", iMac 27' i7, iMac 24" Core Duo). I recently moved to Parallels. I did so partially because of a competitive upgrade price that was cheaper than upgrading my VMWare Fusion license. I have been extremely please with Parallels so far, and like most everything about it better than VMWare Fusion. I find the Coherence mode extremely useful for the 1 app I need to use Windows for.

I find Parallels boots Windows and launches Win applications much faster than my previous version of VMWare Fusion. Granted, the new version of Fusion is supposed to be faster than the old one, but it still seems to be slower than the new version of Parallels, according to benchmark tests in reviews. Plus, I am more than a little ticked off about VMWare's pricing for existing customer upgrades. I was able to buy Parallels for $29 as a competitive upgrade, and VMWare wanted to charge me $49 for a customer upgrade, even though I had already paid for an upgrade from 2 to 3. This aligns pretty much with VMWare's pricing in the enterprise market, also. I work in an enterprise environment, and VMWare is really starting to price themselves out of our shop. Too many good competitors out there for that kind of pricing attitude. But then again, EMC never seems to get this.

 

[Wrathwitch]

Boot Camp.

I had the previous MBA 13" model.

No problems with running Windows 7 on it. I have not run Office on it though. I assume that since it is the full OS that it is compatable with MS Office.

If your wife is not technically inclined, Boot Camp can be a bit of a pain if you forget to select which OS to boot into, or when doing the multiple Windows updates to select "reboot in Window 7". Or if god help you, you don't update mac updates within Windows 7 etc.

If anyone was curious, I did it this way because I wanted to be able to load any video games that are only windows compatable and to make WoW portable with me (runs best in native windows on such a small machine imo).

It also helps me walk my mom through trouble shooting on her PC via phone.

WW