Newbie question about OS Virtualisation

Hey all,

I have a question about running OS Virtualisation in Snow Leopard. I will be receiving my copy of Windows 7 soon and am undecided about running it in Boot Camp or whether to use VirtualBox and run it in virtualisation.

I totally understand that using Boot Camp will allow it to use the hardware of my Macbook natively, whereas virtualising the OS will not. I am not planning to do anything processor intensive on Windows 7 (I'll use Snow Leopard for video editing, Etc) so am not too bothered if I don't have 'full capacity' on the Windows side.

My question is this:-

I understand that, by running Windows in virtualisation, I will need to allocate a certain amount of RAM to the OS. Is the RAM I allocate to the virtual OS, taken away from the Mac OS? I have 4 GB RAM in my Macbook so, if I was to allocate 2gb RAM to the Windows side, does that then mean that my Mac OS side will only have 2gb RAM to function with?

If so, I may end up using Boot Camp, as I know that the Windows side will use the full 4GB RAM.

Am I missing something here?

Many thanks in advance,
Lugz

You can choose to allocate as much RAM as you want to the Virtual OS. You can change it any time you want as well.

I have 4GB installed on my Mac and when I run Windows 7 via VMware It runs perfectly fine with 1 GB allocated to it.

And when you allot the RAM, it's not always in use. The virtual RAM will only be in use when you VM is booted up. If you need the full 4GB for either OS X, you will have to go with Boot Camp.

If you stay to doing things that aren't resource intensive, you probably won't notice much if you have 4GB of RAM. I run VMs that use as much as 2GB of RAM and I don't notice (m)any hiccups on OS X.

The real question is whether you want to run the two systems side-by-side, switching as needed from one to the other, or whether you are happy with using each application independently of the other.

If the latter, use BootCamp - if the former, you need a VM.