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    Does Windows run smoothly on MacBook Air 2012 via Parallels?

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by a5med, Jun 19, 2012.

  1. a5med

    a5med Newbie

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    A question to lucky owners of the new MacBook Air 2012. I am thinking about buying this laptop.

    I'm okay with using Mac OS X on a daily basis, but I also need to do some work in Visual Studio, so I need to run Windows, preferably in Parallels.

    How does the 1.8 GHz i5 processor cope with that?

    I don't need Aero, the classic theme is all I need.
     
    a5med, Jun 19, 2012
    #1
  2. Gbates

    Gbates Newbie

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    I've similar needs, so I'm also very interested in answer to this question.
     
    Gbates, Jun 19, 2012
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  3. Spiral Man

    Spiral Man Notebook Consultant

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    I want to know how well games run!


    I saw a video of shogun 2: shogun2 parallels7 - YouTube

    Looks fairly playable with Parallels 7.


    Parallels used to suck though. back in 07-08 everyone praised VM Fusionwear, but these days its not so?



    I wonder how games like Guild Wars 2 will run! Is there a designated performance hit % you can count on when running virtualization?
     
    Spiral Man, Jun 19, 2012
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  4. doh123

    doh123 Without ME its just AWESO

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    That should be this cpu

    It says it supports the virtualization extension which Parallels will use, so it should run pretty good.

    when it comes to gaming... it runs decently on many titles. Slower than native Windows, but many games are playable with lower settings. Remember though its using Wine tech for its DirectX handling in OpenGL, so its still limited to DX9 games even if you have Win7 with DX11.
     
    doh123, Jun 19, 2012
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  5. Spiral Man

    Spiral Man Notebook Consultant

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    ​
    good to know :)
     
    Spiral Man, Jun 19, 2012
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  6. bogatyr

    bogatyr Notebook Evangelist

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    In regards to VS: The 2011 MBA ran it flawlessly using VMWare Fusion in Unity mode (integrated into OS X). I use this on my work MBA all the time for Visual Studio and server admin tools.
     
    bogatyr, Jun 20, 2012
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  7. joer80

    joer80 Notebook Evangelist

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    cpu isnt so much the bottleneck with virtualization. 8 gigs of ram is very important, and hard drive speed is also important.
     
    joer80, Jun 20, 2012
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  8. kornchild2002

    kornchild2002 Notebook Deity

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    Even 4GB of RAM is fine for intensive processes in Parallels and Windows 7. I run several MATLAB macros each containing thousands of lines of code (average is around 3000) referencing one another along with producing visual graphs (at 1024X768) and pulling in data from hundreds (~270) of Excel file housing around 4,000 data points in a 3D XYZ fashion. When running my macros, MATLAB performs almost the same on my 2011 MBA as it did when actually using Boot Camp and that is with dedicating only 1GB of RAM to Windows 7.
     
    kornchild2002, Jun 20, 2012
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