Windows on my Macbook help please

[kingofthesouth]

hey guys
1st post and i need some help!

i have the aluminum macbook late 2008

i am upgrading to a 500gb hard drive and i plan to upgrade the ram from 2 to 4gb if i can come up with some extra money

now i have purchased parallels 5 so i can run windows because i need it for work

not sure if im going to get vista or 7 either it all has to do with how much money i can get together

now this is where im lost. if i only have the 2gb of ram which version of vista or 7 do i need? 32 or 64bit???

if i can come up with the money for the 4gb of ram which version of vista or 7 would i need?

i read something about a ram cap on the 32 bit version.

i will not be playing games or anything else on this. mostly just to work on air force forms that arent compatible with MAC OS

so please someone help me and give me a simple straight forward answer

thanks alot

 

[1ofthedavids]

You can't really expect a straight forward answer because there's not really enough facts. Are you only intending to use Windows in a VM or are you going to use Boot Camp. With a vm, you can only address so much RAM to the vm.

If you're going to use Boot Camp and want to use all 4GB of Ram, then a 64-bit version is what you're going to want. If you're just going to use a vm and only dedicate like 2GB of RAM or so to the machine, then 32-bit will do fine.

Honestly, a simple google search will not hurt you, even an MRoogle search will show you this same discussion brought up multiple times.

 

[kingofthesouth]

i am goin to run windows in parallels.

i have search and it just confuses the hell out of me. sorry

 

[1ofthedavids]

Ok, so, if you're just going to run it only in Parallels, chances are you're not going to be setting the virtual machine to run with 4GB of Ram, since that's going to be your system's cap. Go with a 32-bit version, as that's what would probably do best for you in your situation.

Don't expect native speeds with Parallels, or any vm for that matter. Ya just gotta realize you're running on OS natively, and using it's resources to power another, so you can't compare the vm to an actual PC. If you really need the native speed, I suggest looking into boot camp. It's not really as hard as people make it out to be, and iirc, parallels supported booting your bc partition as a virtual machine as well (I know VMWare does this).

If all you're going to be doing is working on a few documents here and there, then Parallels should be just fine for you (and it seems like that's pretty much what you're doing), but if you need to run some cpu/ram intensive apps, I'd really suggest Boot Camp.

 

[kingofthesouth]

you sir are the man! thanks alot for breaking it down a little more for me.

thanks again