Should I be able to have the following open on a Macbook Pro 2.16 with 2GB of ram and run without delays/problems? MAC OS - Photoshop - Acrobat Pro - Parallels WINDOWS XP OS - Excel and, sometimes Word and/or Powerpoint - Outlook - Explorer - Terminal services This is what I have and while I don't always have everything running, sometimes I do. Things aren't so good. It is slow, and crashes. I've been working like this for several months but am going to change. I may get a PC for all my office stuff but that means 2 laptops, argh, or leaving my office work in the office, also a bit of a poor solution.
No reason why that should not be enough power... I have seen whatever the latest Photoshop is used on computers less than half the MacBook Pro processor decently, at least for the person using it. What do you mean by delays, though? This is a very subjective question. To me a delay is any miniscule delay in time between actions starting. Parallels can cause issues as you probably can see on the forum, but it can also run smoothly, and it is well worth the time once you have it set-up right.
If your not using the latest Adobe CS3 products under OSX you will definitely see delays since it's not universal binary. If you can afford 3GB of ram that would be better. Nuc
How much Ram How much ram do you have allocated to parallels. I run similar programs on a 17 inch macbook pro with 2 gb ram and it works fine. I have 1gb allocated to parallels
2 GB of Memory , means that 1 gig will be for MAC and the other 1 gig will stay for Parallels guest OS. So in any ways all programs installed should be well organized and harddrive space must be enough . Note , that there are many programs are consuming a lot of memory , also some programs start working even when we don't need them. Often harddrive is not treated properly , without periodical tech maintenance such as cleaning. After all this happens , some of our users begin complaining of how slow the system is with parallels. In fact , what I think we need to take care of HD, Memory. Resolver
Resolver raised a very good issue. Your Hard Drive. You will find a big performance difference between a 5400 rpm drive and a 7200 rpm drive. Probably larger than going from 2 to even 4 GB in most tasks.
That is what I thought before I read this article, which maintains that given the same amount of data on two different drives, there is little functional difference between a smaller, faster one and a larger, slower one: <http://www.barefeats.com/mbcd7.html>. The reason has to do with the percentage of the drive that the data is taking up, i.e., 50 GB of data on a 100 GB drive is using 50% of the drive while the same amount of data is only using 25% of a 200 GB drive. David
Mmm... Yes and no... If you have your disk properly maintained the access time should be dependent upon the drive and cache speed (another thing to think about). Here is the process of a read: 1. Read index to find sectors that file is stored in 2. Seek sectors 3. Access sectors The access time goes down if the data is all in one place, as the hard drive does not have to move from one sector on one side of the disk to another on the other side. If you keep the small disk properly defragmented, the files will be in sectors next to each other.
