Advice Wanted - Thinking about going to a Macbook Air

Currently I have a MacBook Pro, with 8 gigs of ram, and really enjoy my Parallels install. This laptop is going away and I'm shopping for a new solution. I'm leaning towards the Macbook Air, so my question is....is that going to be as viable of a solution with only 4 gigs of ram? Does anybody have one that's using parallels that can tell me about your experience?

 

I am running a late 2010 MBA - osX lion & parallels 7

MS office 2010 for windows, and a few other windows only applications; i set the windows allocation at 2 GB of RAM. Browsers and apple specific applications on osX simultaneous to windows (with numerous large excel files at>30 megs)

no issues - it is awesome, i show off the simultaneous OS's all the time on the MBA .... now i only wish that i could install osX on my 16GB i7 windows desktop.

 

Hello Claggett,

4 GB of RAM should be enough for your Parallels installation in case if you don't use any RAM consuming application, e.g. graphical app. In this case the performance may appear a little bit slow - but still the virtual machine should work flawlessly.

Just make sure you have assigned less than 50% of RAM to your virtual machine so that your Mac can work with the good speed.

 

From my personal experience, with 4GB RAM, running Windows on Parallels with 1GB assigned, and Safari on OSX, I did get some slowing paging, the math is simple, Safari can consume 1 GB easily, plus 1 GB for the VM, plus around 0.5 GB for Parallels, and around 1GB for OSX, you are left with just 0.5 GB.

A 2 GB VM would make running Safari impossible without paging.

There are two culprits here:

* Safari consumes a lot of RAM over time.
* Parallels itself, the app, seems to consume quite a lot of RAM.

 

I'm running a Parallels VM on a 2011 MBAir. I gave it 1.5 Gigs of Ram which is plenty, 1 core, and a 32 Gig virtual hard drive. It's running Windows 7 just fine. I often run the VM, a couple of MS Office 2008 Mac programs, Safari, and iTunes together, and it works extremely well. I guess the Air's SSD helps.