Best OS and config for Parallels to just run Outlook and Sharepoint

Hi everyone,

I have the last gen Apple MacBook Air 13", the Ivy Bridge one with 4GB of ram. I have Parallels Desktop 8. I need it just to run Outlook 2013 in Coherance mode as well as mapping a Sharepoint drive to Explorer to be shared with my Mac. I have a licence for Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows 8. Since I'm just using this for one application, is there any OS/config that would use the least resources and keep the mac running fast? I doubt XP is a good option, but is 8 better than 7 etc, and what amount of ram would you recommend dedicating to this task? Thanks!

According to Microsoft, Outlook 2013 or any Office 2013 app is not supported in XP, so it's probably best to move on and use your copy of Windows 7. Windows 8 has a horrible interface which is why I would personally go with Windows 7 instead.

You didn't mention which version of OS X you're running, but generally Mavericks is better at handling memory than previous versions of OS X. As for Parallels, I would assign 2 GB to the Windows 7 VM which should be sufficient.

Thanks for the help, so even if I only have 4GB of ram in my Mac and am only running Parallels to do basic tasks like some IE browsing etc, I should still assign 2GB of ram? That won't slow down my mac?

It shouldn't slow you down provided you shut down the virtual machine when you're through doing whatever you need in Windows. In other words, do not leave the VM running in the background or as suspended. Since you can't add memory to your machine, there's really not much you can do. You can always try just assigning 1 GB of memory to the virtual machine to see how well it will run. It's easy to add more if necessary.