If about to install Parallels Desktop on iMac with 512MB DDR2 SDRAM (2HGz Intel Duo) is it best to upgrade RAM - magazine articles suggested it's the critical issue on virtual machines. Don't really intend to pay games on Windows (XP) guest OS!
512M means you'll have a maximum of 256M per virtual machine (plus the space parallels itself takes in RAM). Given how RAM-hungry OS-X is, I would highly recommend that you go to at least a Gigabyte, maybe 1.5 (I've 1 GB and am contemplating up'ing to 2 myself). Cheers...
512 on my mini/1.66 was painful. I had 148MB assigned to XP which was the amount recommended by Parallels. It's not that xp was super slow, it was that switching between xp and mac os was slow. Way too much swapping when moving between operating systems. I put a 1gb stick in so now I have 1.25gb and it screams both in macos and xp. I upped the vm to have 512 dedicated ram. Your mileage may vary of course.
