installing windows 7 on a MBA, x32 or x64?

Dear support team,

I recently bought Parallels to run windows on my MacBoook Air.

MBA specs:
1.8 GHz intel Core i7, 4gb memory

my question is: Can I run/install a Windows 7 Ultimate x64, and will it use one of the 2 2gb memory slots?

 

I'm not the 'support team' but I can answer you.

Yes, you can run x64 versions of Operating systems in Parallels.

I would recommend leaving at least 3 GB for OS X, specially if you have Safari (or another browser) open on the OS X side, or else performance will become very sluggish, this means assigning only 1 GB to Windows (Windows 7 works fine with 1 GB).

From my past experience of running Parallels with 4 GB RAM installed, the maximum amount I was able to use on Virtual Machines was 1.5 GB RAM (leaving 2.5 for OS X), by use I mean before OS X would become slow due to paging. This of course depends very much on what applications you have open on the OS X side, and how much memory they consume, that's why I mentioned Safari as it can easily consume 1 GB. If you close most applications on OSX side before starting Windows VM, then maybe you can assign 2 GB to it.

 

Thank you Specimen,

the reason is because I bought windows ultimate which I thought was x64, but after step by step installation through Parallels I looked at the system preferences and it said it was x32 and was using 1gb memory. I probably did something wrong..

thank you for you help
by noob

 

1 GB is the default amount of RAM Parallels assigns to a Windows 7 VM either it's 32 or 64 bit, this amount can be changed in the VM configuration.