Vista on MacBook Core Duo (2 GB RAM)

J

joelwnelson

Junior Member
After yet another crash involving use of an XP Boot Camp partition in Parallels, I am considering doing away with the Boot Camp idea altogether and "upgrading" to a Vista VM in Parallels (using a version licensed for virtualization).

I have a MacBook with a Core Duo processor (2 GHz, 2 GB RAM). I know Aero won't work, but aside from that what kind of experience am I likely to have? As a web developer I would prefer to have the latest testing system available, unless performance would be hit so sharply that it would not be a pleasant operating experience. Using an XP Boot Camp partition in Parallels, I get near-native speeds in Windows while at the same time running 3+ Mac apps. My main reason for considering Vista is to have support for future versions of IE after 7.0 (necessary for web development and testing).
 
Dear Joelwnelson

Good morning to you..
I too a web application developer on MBP (Duo2.16, 1GB) w/ WinXP SP2 pro.
IE7 works fine and everything I have MX2004 and SQL EM. I have not had any issues..nor speed problem... (32Gb HD, 512M RAM) Regarding Vista, I think, we should wait till least SP1 on that... Other than that I'm very happy with parallels!
Good luck!

JL
 
I installed Vista with Parallels on my Macbook (C2D 2GHz with 2GB RAM, with 1GB allocated to Vista) last night. Everything was fine, except when I played MP3s, they were playing slow, and was stuttering. I'm not sure what that was, as I didn't have any issues with drivers, and the audio is mapped and made available. :confused:
 
chrishch said:
I installed Vista with Parallels on my Macbook (C2D 2GHz with 2GB RAM, with 1GB allocated to Vista) last night. Everything was fine, except when I played MP3s, they were playing slow, and was stuttering. I'm not sure what that was, as I didn't have any issues with drivers, and the audio is mapped and made available. :confused:
Click to expand...

The C2D is faster than the Core Duo, however. I'm not very worried about bugs, as I've used Vista before and don't find it to be that buggy for what I need it for. My main concern is speed and resources usage. If I turn off the eye candy, will I be able to run Vista as fast as XP runs, using similar memory usage? Or will XP (with Luna graphics) still remain faster and less resource-hungry?
 
Older versions of Windows run faster on Parallels. The less eye candy you enable on Windows, the less resources consumed and the faster it runs. There is no right answer to you question. If you really want the fastest and least resource consuming version of Windows running under Parallels that can still run IE 7, I'd stick with XP and disable all eyecandy.

I do lots of web development (with lot's of AJAX) , and I run my XP VM minus XP eye candy on only 256 meg RAM. I disable sound, usb, etc, since I don't need it. I don't run Coherence, since I'm only using a single XP app (IE) and maximizing it within the parallels windows is essentially the same thing as coherence for this use.

In this environment I see CPU resources consumed around 10-12% and memory of only 356M. This leave me lot's of resources to run JBoss, Eclipse and all kinds of other goodies.

I get slightly below native to slightly above native speeds depending on the specific operation.
 
Looking ahead to IE 7.5 or 8.0... both of which will likely be Vista-only... I'm wondering if I may still be best off using Vista with all eye candy shut off. I own licenses and installation media for both systems, so needing to purchase one or the other isn't an issue. Perhaps I should just install both and do hands-on testing.
 
joelwnelson said:
Looking ahead to IE 7.5 or 8.0... both of which will likely be Vista-only... I'm wondering if I may still be best off using Vista with all eye candy shut off. I own licenses and installation media for both systems, so needing to purchase one or the other isn't an issue. Perhaps I should just install both and do hands-on testing.
Click to expand...

Joel,

Sounds like you are going to answer your own question...I have the exact same machine as you do (OK - not yet - I am in the process of ordering the upgrade to get my RAM to 2gb). I plan on installing Vista on parallels...I will let you know how things go if I get it done before you.
 
I have both XP and Vista running on my Macbook C2D with 2Gb ram. I don't see the point of using Vista at the moment. XP does everything I want it to do, it works fast in virtulisation and all my programs are installed in it.

Vista is nice, not a lot of stuff works in it just yet. iSight doesn't work, sound is patchy etc. It is also slow, and I really don't see the point of using Vista without eyecandy - it seems to be the big seller.

It looks okay. But really XP is fine!

Why not have both? Surely that is the cool thing bout Parallels - you can have all the OS you want all on one computer!
 
dotcomjunkie said:
Joel,

Sounds like you are going to answer your own question...I have the exact same machine as you do (OK - not yet - I am in the process of ordering the upgrade to get my RAM to 2gb). I plan on installing Vista on parallels...I will let you know how things go if I get it done before you.
Click to expand...

I have Vista running under Parallels now. It's pretty fast -- not 100% as fast as XP, but decent. It still leaves enough resources left over to run Firefox, Safari, Mail, Finder, etc. in OS X at the same time.
 
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