Macbook Air and Parallels 7

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Zyzzyva

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I family member has asked me about running windows 7 in parallels on a macbook air. They are trying to decide between the pro and the air, obviously preferring the Air. Ive never owned an air, only macbook pro's and imacs, so frankly i have no idea really.

What is parallels' performance like compared to running it on a 2011 macbook pro? Is performance acceptable when running fairly light programs?

P.s. space is not an issue.
 
You shouldn't have any problems with parallels on a Mac Air, I run it on a Mac Mini (2011).

The only thing you might need to do is upgrade the memory to 8Gb. My found my OS X slow when running a virtual machine, but upgrading the memory sorted that out.
 
Last edited:
B.K said:
The only thing you might need to do is upgrade the memory to 8Gb.
Click to expand...
Not supported on the Air unfortunately. Since I'm quite a heavy Win/Office user, I prefer Bootcamp to VM (Parallels).
 
I still run VMware Fusion on a 2008 vintage MacBook Pro, which is around half as powerful as the MacBook Air i5. Provided Parallels doesn't perform signifcantly worse than VMware (doubtful, they're both pretty good), it'll run just fine.

The only thing to look out for is how much memory they have - some came with 2GB - and how much memory you're giving the VM. If you want to run Windows Vista or 7, and you have only 2GB RAM in the MacBook, you might want to stick to doing one thing at a time - massively multitasking is going to cause it to swap, which isn't all that healthy for an SSD.
 
I run VMware Fusion4 on my 2011 Macbook Pro 8GB ram it runs fine but if you deciding on a machine go for the pro as you can upgrade it whilst u cannot upgrade the air unless you like soldering and removing the ultra delicate battery and voiding your warranty.But general work on a virtual system the air should be fine as long as it has 4GB ram .
But also consider using bootcamp to run windows
 
Thanks guys. I guess it should be fine on the Air provided its got 4 gigs of ram. If it gives problems i'll just get tiny7 or something for them. On a side note: windows 8 runs pretty well, but its not yet 100% bug free in parallels even with the latest updates. Once they iron out all the kinks i think itll make a wonderful OS to run in parallels.
 
I've been running VM VirtualBox for the past year on my MacBook Pro without any hassles - although I only use it to run a genealogy program and it's free :)
 
Stalker said:
I've been running VM VirtualBox for the past year on my MacBook Pro without any hassles - although I only use it to run a genealogy program and it's free :)
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Yeah i got a macbook pro and parallels runs very well on it, the issue is the air. :)

Eish, that reminds me, the rumour mill has started talking about new slimmer macbook pros which have supposedly hit the production line. It may make sense to wait and see what comes from that. It'll be ivy bridge, with a [very] small chance of a retina display.
 
My experience on a MBP 2010 is that virtualisation has an impact on performance. So, yes you can run it, but with a performance hit
 
Every Mac since around 2007 has had a processor with the VT flag, i.e. the CPU does virtualisation natively, which means *no* performance hit. Your perceived performance hit comes from a shortage of whatever other resources, i.e. memory, and sharing a hard drive with the host OS.

Also, the filesystem in the virtual machine will never perform as well as it would have natively on the hard drive, but that is true for every computer ever made, and will always be, unless your virtualisation program (Parallels/VMware) allows you to use a raw storage device (i.e. a second hard disc in your computer). VMWare Fusion doesn't - dunno about Parallels. VMware server and Workstation under Linux always has, which is massively nice if you're after high I/O performance.

But that's besides the point. No CPU in the world is going to make a difference to the shared memory/shared IO performance limitations. The perceived hit will be exactly the same on a 2008 MacBook Pro as it is on a 2011 MacBook Pro and the same as on a 2011 MacBook Air.
 
Three choices:
VMWare ($$$)
Parallels ($$$)
and Virtual Box (Free)

are available. Think carefully before you commit though. At the moment, and for about another week, you can get VMWare at a fantastic discount along with 10 other apps, of which only one is killer: Drive Genius. http://www.mupromo.com/

Recently, Parallels was on special so I do not expect one soon. But you never know. The bundle above is $50, cheaper than either VM or Para on their own.

I have been using VM for quite some time and found it to be just fine for my needs.
 
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