PD7 & Lion w/3GB ram

I have a late-2006 MacBookPro (MacBookPro2,2; 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo) with the maximum 3GB ram. I'm planning on upgrading to Lion by this summer (I always stay about one iteration behind ). I have PD6 w/an XP guest OS and just purchased the PD7 upgrade. Now, I see under system requirements that 4GB ram is recommended under Lion. Can I expect at least reasonable performance w/Lion & only 3GB? I presume that upgrading the guest OS to Windows 7 wouldn't be recommended.

 

With Windows XP performance can be still reasonably well - and yes - no Win 7 certainly.

 

It's a myth that XP memory requirements are less than Windows 7 32bit, after Service Pack 3 Windows XP memory requirements raised considerably, Vista and 7 have optimized memory management, you can run a Windows 7 32bit VM with 1 GB RAM smoothly or even on 768 MB, XP SP3 is rather slow on 768 MB. It is also not advisable to run XP without SP3.

How much RAM you have assigned your XP guest?

 

I'm running XP with 1,272 MB assigned.

 

You can run Windows 7 32 bit with that if you want to upgrade.

 

According to Win7 system requirements this OS eats at least 1 GB itself + some amount of memory for virtualization. Technically it can run, but from my personal experience the result is not always satisfactory.

 

From my personal experience, I've tested/ran Photoshop CS 4 on Windows 7 with just 1 GB RAM.