Parallels Windows XP - Slow my iMac - Memory requirements

Hi

Is 4Gb ram enough for Parallels and XP on my iMac.

When I first installed it it seemed quick enough but as Ive used it more it does slow my mac down to a crawl at times.

I have a 3.1GHz i5 27" with 4gbyte of ram.

Is the £160 i need to upgrade to 8Gbyte a worthwhile investment.

Thanks for any advice.

Zip

You can check out my post here. It should answer your questions.

http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/apple-notebooks/266985-should-i-upgrade-my-ram.html#p

Bill

Thanks, really useful..Looks like another credit card hit coming up .........

I upgraded from 4g to 8g and it only cost me $45.00. Check out Crucial.

BTW, I have a MacBook Pro, but i assume it's easier on an iMac.

Short answer - 4 GB should be fine. I've run XP in a vm on a MBA with only 2 GB of RAM and it worked fine. I would do the install and then see whether the performance is to your expectations; you can always add RAM later if need be.

Cheers

Ordered an extra 8Gb ram from Crucial and Ill see how that goes ;-)

Another big question - beyond the RAM - how many cores have you assigned to your VM?

If you have (for example) a dual core machine and assign 2 cores to the vm (same goes for a quad core if you assign 4 cores to the vm), you'll end up with issues and terrible performance (both on the host OS and guest).

Hi

The default..I think!! I can't see a setting in Parallels to alter the no. of cores...

Put the full12Gb ram in and it does seem remarkably quick, even given windows and extra 1Gb to play with and with a few programs open I still have 6.3Gb free..

This is my biggest issue with virtualizing hardware. The performance hit is felt on both the host OS as well as the parasite OS.

Yes, the use of the word "parasite" was intentional