I have been (mostly) successful in running WinXP on my MacBook in the office, but its not quite seamless. The major slow-down to productivity at present is switching from WinXP to Mac OSX. For example, I can cut a slab of data from an application in WinXP and paste it to Excel in Mac OSX, but it takes quite a long time (10-20 seconds-ish) to switch from one to the other. My current configuration is 1 GB RAM, with Parallels automatically allocated memory (I note the max manual memory is 704 MB). Whilst there are no apps running, I note that the Mac activity monitor registers about 810 MB memory as 'wired' and 11MB as 'free'. Does this indicate that the RAM is maxed out? The simple maths suggests that WinXP grabs up to 700MB, leaving Mac OS X with about 300MB, and that's not very much for either platform. Would things go a lot quicker with more, say 2GB, RAM?
As Purplish stated, definitely go to 2 GB RAM. (And more than that wouldn't hurt.) In the meantime, however, you might try allocating only 256 GB to Windows--this may be enough to get by on for a while. David
810 Wired out of a Gig is a recipe for Swap file city. You definitely need more ram or need to constrain XP to 256M
Apple support doc on memory usage: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107918 'wired' and 'free' do not mean what is usually thought.... I also agree... 2GB is basically the minimum for running XP on OSX.
You can significantly speed up a Win XP VM by going to control panel/system/advanced/performance settings and then seleccting "adjust for best performance". This will turn off all the basically useless but resource-hungry XP visual styles and graphics and revert the system to "classic" (Win 2000 and earlier) video settings. I have a 2 gig RAM iMac and this has improved things significantly.
