Paralells - what's the story?

Faustus

Faustus

Faustus

Soldato
Joined
20 Mar 2007
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Can anyone advise about using virtualization on a Mac i.e. how much of the resources does it hog? The wife wants me to install W7 on her iMac (I have a spare retail copy of HP) I was thinking about using Parallels (the latest version) as I have seen some good write ups about it and believe it to be better than Fusion. I could just use VirtualBox but from what I've read Parallels really integrates Windows into the Mac desktop and can be accessed with just a click of the mouse. What I don't want to do is for the application to rob the machine of valuable RAM etc and slow down everything else. I also don't want to dedicate a huge chunk of the HD to Windows either.

I look forward to your replies.
 
What model iMac has she got? I use parallels on a MacBook pro 4gb/2.53GHz Core 2 Duo for work and its fine, I don't notice any slow down. I gave the XP install 1gb of the memory and its been fine that way since about February.
 
I ran parallels briefly. It lets you select how much system resources to dedicate to windows, so I was able to choose how may cpu cores it would use and how much RAM it would use.

Parallels is a good app, I didn't have much slowdown (MBP 2010, i5, 4GB RAM, 320gb HDD). I dedicated 2GB RAM to windows 7 and it was all very smooth. You do lose HDD space to parallels when using it though.
 
It's the outgoing 21.5" iMac C2D with 4 Gig of RAM and 500gig HD. Neither of the posters appear to have given much HD space to Windows. Can I assume then that it's a dynamically expanding HD, as by the time I have installed W7 and MS Office Enterprise Edition plus some other progs that will eat up quite a bit of HD space. Where is the data accessed from e.g. the files you keep in OS X or do you have to replicate them on the Windows virtual HD? If duplicate files then the HD will very quickly fill up. I believe you can keep the image on an external drive though not sure how well that will work.
 
Faustus said:
It's the outgoing 21.5" iMac C2D with 4 Gig of RAM and 500gig HD. Neither of the posters appear to have given much HD space to Windows. Can I assume then that it's a dynamically expanding HD, as by the time I have installed W7 and MS Office Enterprise Edition plus some other progs that will eat up quite a bit of HD space. Where is the data accessed from e.g. the files you keep in OS X or do you have to replicate them on the Windows virtual HD? If duplicate files then the HD will very quickly fill up. I believe you can keep the image on an external drive though not sure how well that will work.
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I don't know about Parallels, but virtualbox can use virtual network drive type things to access your OS X docs from within the VM.
 
Well, I use parallels to access my bootcamp windows install, so its a seperate "User Managed" partition. I gave it 50GB which is more than enough for me. As an example I have Windows XP + Office 2003 Pro + SAP + A couple of minor programs and in total its using 6GB so I could down size the partition if I wanted.
 
jonislost said:
Well, I use parallels to access my bootcamp windows install, so its a seperate "User Managed" partition. I gave it 50GB which is more than enough for me. As an example I have Windows XP + Office 2003 Pro + SAP + A couple of minor programs and in total its using 6GB so I could down size the partition if I wanted.
Click to expand...

So where is the data kept that you use in Windows e.g. all your Word docs etc. Can I enquire as to why you used Bootcamp instead of letting Parallels do the job for you?
 
Haven't tried parallels but very happy with vmware. I have a Mac mini with 8gb of ram. I have 2gb assigned to vista and it runs really quickly
 
Version 3.1 of fusion is very good and improved things greatly over 3. I've used both Parallels 5 and Fusion and have stuck with fusion, it does everything I need it to and for me was more stable and consistent. They both do very similar things and to be honest if your only looking to run some windows apps and to integrate them into OSX then they both do that...so get which ever you can cheaper
 
Sagalout said:
Haven't tried parallels but very happy with vmware. I have a Mac mini with 8gb of ram. I have 2gb assigned to vista and it runs really quickly
Click to expand...

Now that's interesting - that you've got a Mac Mini that is. My neighbour has been on about getting one of these as his main Desktop PC with just the standard offering i.e. 2.4 C2D 2 gig of RAM and the 350 HD. Do you think it can hold it's own as the main family Desktop PC? He doesn't play games so it's just the usual stuff i.e. Office apps, photos, bit of video editing, browsing and emails etc. I think it might not be up to the job plus it's hellish expensive for what it is.
 
Another vote for vmware. Didnt get on very well with parallels when I used it. Neither the integration or separate screens mode did much for me. Vmware just seems to work without me ever thinking about it. Great piece of virtualisation software.
 
Why not just use Bootcamp and dual boot? I don't do it myself but apparently it's quite simples.
 
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