(I thought I had posted this, but can't find it). Every once in a while, my wife discovers a game won't install with the current RAM or video memory, so I bump it up in Parallels. Currently I have over 800K RAM, and the music sounds strained when logging onto Windows XP. How do I tell if I am using too much RAM or Video Memory? What are the trade offs?
I think you mean 800MB, not 800K.... It's been a long time since a computer would work with 800K of RAM. The tradeoff is pretty simple actually. Whenever you give more memory to a VM, you take some of it away from MacOS. Consider how much memory you have in your machine, and the fact that MacOS (10.4 anyways) basically requries 1gb of RAM for itself. If MacOS does not have enough RAM it will slow down all applications running in it (this includes Parallels). This means that if you want to give 800MB of RAM to your VM you should have at least 1.8GB in your Mac. There is a 'optimal' amount of memory for the VM that will make your system go fastest, above that and below it it will go slower... To put this more bluntly, if you give your VM too much RAM your VM will go slower. I find that XP runs fine (with my use) with 512MB.
Video Memory The video memory configuration recommends no higher than a setting of 16. Yet when trying to run coherence and periodically when running VM in full screen mode I get a window telling me I need to increase the VM memory. This morning I increased to 20. Still got the message in coherence. If I keep using it anyway the video is wavy when I pass the mouse over it. I think this is mainly due to one program I run in XP. I am using build 3188. Suggestions? Steve
32MB is not a bad choice. This is often the minimum defined by many programs and settings, and seems to perform quite speedily on my system.
