Hi. New user question I have ordered Parallels Desktop 5.0 to run on my mac which is current i3 spec (Mac OS X 10.6.4, 3.06GHz, 4GB ram, 500GB HDD). My question is which full version of windows should I order to run as VM? I can see that the 64 bit version should work okay and I don't have any hardware or peripheral issues. Do I need to assign 2GB of the ram to the VM and would that be enough for 64 bit? In parallel mode, would each OS work ok with 2GB? Daft question but when the VM is closed, do all resources return to the host? Do I create a partition on the Macintosh HD and if so, given the above spec, and working on the basis of the OS and windows applications (no need for anything but minimal personal folders and files within Windows, how much space should I allocate to the VM? Hope the post is clear to understand and thanks in advance for replies.
I've always gone with 32bit. 64bit will benchmark slightly faster (even as a VM) but requires slightly more operating memory than 32bit (the WoW layers, 64bit addressing regardless of installed memory, etc). With only 2ishGB allocated, I'd prefer as much of it be available to apps as possible, so go 32bit/x86. (above 3GB, go with 64bit). For Win7, give the VM 1.5GB and set the allocated video memory to 128MB. I don't know what apps you plan on using, but you should be fine running both Windows and OSX desktop apps concurrently. Don't worry about setting up a separate 'parallels' partition. Having one will actually decrease performance as the hard drive heads have to physically move further along the platter. If you wanted to throw the images on another disk though, go for it.
