Mac/Win upgrade advice needed

I plan to do a complete Mac OS & Windows upgrade on my iMac and would appreciate some advice about the best procedures to use. Any help would be appreciated.

The computer itself is a slightly old iMac (late 2007) with a Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz processor, 4 GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM, 320 GB HD. The current software configuration is as follows:
-Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.8
-Windows Vista Business SP2 installed on a 44 GB Boot Camp partition
-Parallels Desktop for Mac 5

I'd like the newly upgraded configuration to be as follows:
-Mac OS X Lion
-Windows 7 Home Ultimate installed on the Boot Camp partition
-Parallels Desktop for Mac 7

Because of what Mac OS X Lion/Parallels will and will not support re. Boot Camp and Windows, I know that I need to be careful about how I proceed. That's why I'm here. I have another Mac (a new Macbook Air) with a configuration similar to what I'm trying to achieve with this one, and Parallels/Win 7 runs beautifully on it. But I'm concerned about performance on this older machine. Any advice about viability and usability would also be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

Hello jwrightabq,

Your inquiry should be reviewed by technical support engineers. Please submit a suport request at:

www.parallels.com/support/request > Technical Issue in Parallels product

In the form you will be promted to enter your support code. It is available under your personal account at www.parallels.com

 

Core 2 Duo and 4 GB or RAM is in fact not bad configuration. And Boot Camp based VM should in my experience run faster in limited system than HDD based VM.

In general, everything in your future upgrade is compatible and should work - just be careful creating Boot Camp partition and follow Apple instruction step-by-step. Incorrectly installed Boot Camp cannot be read by Parallels Sometimes (sometimes it can but it is not the best configuration when Boot Camp is installed incorrectly, you know..).

And do not let Virtual Machine to grab more than 1,5 GB of RAM (2 - is the top of Maximim but i suggest to stick to 1,5).

In general - just follow instructions carefully and everything should work like a charm