[neilw]

Hi,
I'm in the process of recommending a MacBook for my sister-in-law, to run mostly Mac stuff but occasional Windows stuff for work. Is 1.5 GB enough RAM to reasonably run Parallels? I find 1 GB is enough for OSX (more is better, but 1 GB functions fine), and that would leave *at least* 512 MB for Parallels. Again, probably less than ideal, but functional.

Thoughts?

[ghporter]

I run Parallels on my MacBook Pro with ONE gigabyte of RAM. It works fine this way. Yes, more is better whenever you are talking about RAM, so at least 1GB is what I'd go with. 1.5GB should be great.

[neilw]

Excellent, thanks. I figured it ought to be plenty, but you never know.

[Eug]

The MacBook can be noticeably slower in some stuff with unmatched RAM, because the GPU is dependent on system memory. With unmatched RAM you lose dual-channel support, and thus everything requiring the GPU slows down. 1.5 GB means unmatched RAM (512 + 1024 MB).

That's one of the reasons I went with 2 GB RAM. 1 GB RAM is insufficient for me. It's OK if you run a few things at a time, but if open up a lot of windows including Rosetta'd applications, the MacBook quickly will need to page out to the hard disk.

As for XP in Parallels, I actually only allocate 320 MB to it, but that's I don't do much in Windows. I just run Quicken, virus software, Firefox, and a couple of other small apps.

If 1 GB is truly fine for you in OS X, then perhaps you'd do OK with Parallels with 1 GB too, allocating 256 MB to the Parallels virtual machine. I guess it depends on what you need Parallels for.

[Macola]

Go with 2 GB if you can. You'll appreciate the difference.