I have a MBP, i5 CPU and 4G ram.
I run win7 using virtualbox and I allocate 2G ram for win7, only to find my Mac acts too slowly.
What can I do for that? Am I allocating too much ram?
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Sign up to join this communityI have a MBP, i5 CPU and 4G ram.
I run win7 using virtualbox and I allocate 2G ram for win7, only to find my Mac acts too slowly.
What can I do for that? Am I allocating too much ram?
A Mac, especially one running Snow Leopard or Lion, requires at least 2 GB of RAM for decent system performance.
Even through the system requirements for Snow Leopard are 1 GB, it doesn't perform well with 1 GB. Lion requires 2 GB of RAM just to be able to run. If you plan on running a virtual machine setup and expect decent performance from both machines, I'd have 8 GB of RAM in my machine. You can get 8 GB of ram for less than $50 from OWC.
Also, If you're not doing anything major in Windows, I'd lose the 64 bit installation, bump it down to 1 GB of RAM and try again. I use 32 bit Win7 Enterprise for work through a Parallels VM and only allocate 1 GB of RAM for it and it runs great, especially in coherence mode.
In addition to the more RAM suggestion from Matt, I would look at investing in a solid state disk (SSD). Generally, user experience is bottlenecked on disk input/output, and an SSD has much higher throughput. Ever since I installed an SSD in my machine I no longer have 2nd thoughts about firing a VM and slowing down my system - I see almost no performance impact.