Windows on the MBA - Parallels or Fusion performance experience?

Hi all,

i am seriously considering switching from a Sony TZ Windows machine to a MBA. I am finally sick of windows and also the TZ's ultralow power processor (1,06Ghz).

Due to my clients i need to work with quite some windows applications continuously (that's what held me back from switching so far).
I mainly need to use Office applications, nothing special and performance intensive like CAD, Photoshop etc...

I am considering the 1.8, 64GB SSD version but I'm a bit unsure about its performance running Parallels or Fusion on it.
I think a Bootcamp partition will bring down HD space to zero so that's probably not an option....

Do you think the MBA will guarantee me "sufficient" power to work in a "snappy" office environment without hickups?

What would you recommend for my scenario? Fusion or Paralles with XP?

Thanks for any input!

 

Considering I can run office just fine on an old pentium 3 700mhz desktop, I think parallels and mba will be just fine. But you might get better performance with xp instead of vista.

 

What you need is not a macbook air, if you want to do serious work get a macbook pro or a macbook, or even a another windows pc.

 

You didn't obviously listen to the OP's needs and concerns, he wants a MBA and he's sick of Windows and you recommend him to get another Windows PC?.

 

As fast as your hard drive may be, it'll be limited to 2GB of ram between however many operating systems. Keep that in mind.

I love my 4GB ram.

 

Remember he is only doing office tasks. 2gb is more than enough for that. I remember running parallels with my old c2d 2.0ghz macbook and only 1gb of ram and it was fine.

you will be more than ok with 2gb, the mba, and parallels. Use xp though.

 

Yeah, use XP. I would be a bit worried since the processor is slow on the MBA. The 2GB is fine. I only have 2 (which is max for CD version) and I run sometimes two instances of VMWare or Parallels (VMWare is better IMHO).
I'd also be worried about the speed of that hard drive...Neither of the hard drives have shown to be that fast. There was some links to benchmarks for it on this forum at one point.

I'd honestly recommend trying to get the OS X version of those programs you need. They may not all be there, but if you can run 75% of them outside of fusion or vmware.... you're gin a good spot.

Or just go get a MB or MBP Both are better machines, and the they both have pretty comparable battery life times (and faster charge times) than the MBA.

 

Flat out Fusion is better. XP all the way....NO VISTA.

I have an XP vm and a Vista vm for supporting clients. The only thing I personally need is Visio and IE on a occasion for myself. I have Office 2007 in the XP vm and I have that VM set to 512meg of ram. It runs great to be honest.

The Vista VM has no apps installed, its just there for when I need to help walk a customer through something in Vista. I have it set to 1gig of RAM, because less than that and its slow as hell. Vista is so terribly sad.

I moved everything I could into OS X native when I switched last November. Again Visio is the only thing I really miss, and I use IE on occasion when doing some Sharepoint testing.

 

I have to admit that I have Fusion (VMWare) AND Parallels, but have never tried Fusion. I've been using Parallels almost since it came out. During that time, I've been able to make it work with all my software and all my devices. It's been slow getting to the point where it's a complete solution for running Windows, but I now have total confidence in it after using it for more than a year.

Keep in mind that I am a Windows developer and run Windows about 80% of the time. I use an external USB broadband modem AND an Expresscard broadband modem depending on convenience. I also use VPN software to connect to my office and remote clients.

I've changed laptops a couple of times (all MACS) and been able to simply copy my vm (virtual machine) from one laptop to another and Parallels will happily run any that it finds. This saves you a TON of time re-installing Windows and applications.

I think Parallels is a great program and have a great deal of confidence in it. The only reason I never tried Fusion is because of the re-installation of Windows and apps that would be required, and the fact that it just works.

 

Thanks for all the replies so far!
Xp is the obvious choice of course after my Vista experiences...

As some posters noted i heard that Mac Office is still pretty much behing Office 2007 so that's why i would like to go the

Also exchanging e.g. ppt presentations with clients between Mac Office and Win Office is something i am not 100% convinced in.
I heard of several problems converting ppt's into Mac and back (at least for the "old" 2004 Mac Office...

Do you also use Parallels on the MBA or is it a MB/ MBP you are running?

 

I have iWork '08 and I have absolutely no issues integrating with a 98% windows world. Keynote exports seamlessly into ppt and pdf, as does Pages export to .doc and others.

Honestly, I'd say go with a Macbook over the MBA. You'll gain speed, space, and upgrade ability, as well as loose a couple thousand on the price tag.


Also, for every windows program there is a mac equivalent. Such as for Visio there's OmniGraffle(which I actually prefer). All it takes is some light investigation and you'll find everything you could ask for.

 

i would recommend using office 2008 without a virtual machine despite your paranoia about it. The virtual machine is just a big burden on your laptop. It WILL slow down your computer and heat it up and drain the battery, because you literally have to run both operating systems at the same time. It can be a useful tool in some cases, but as far as office, office 2008 works fine in mac.

 

I do use Windows XP on my Macbook (2Ghz Core 2 duo, 2gb RAM). I use Vmware with 1Gb RAM mainly for Office (Outlook and Excel, some Word) and PDF and it runs great: fast and cool. I used to work with earlier versions of Parallels and it wasn't as good as Vmware. Although I must confess as I was used to it I took a lot of time till I decided to switch I don't regret it.
I don't think you have problems running Windows on a virtual machine on a MBA. If you finally do it, please share, as I'm interested in that info!! BTW, I began to use Unity for my Windows virtual machine a couple of days ago and, even if I've got to test it more deeply yet, it looks terrific!

DrPoi

 

Why did you buy both Fusion and Parallels as they both serve the same purpose?

 

Because they work different?

I'm going to buy VMWare because I'm tired of Parallels piss poor linux support and nasty attitude toward customers. I remember a dev on their forums saying they wouldn't try to support using windows from the VM on different monitors (i.e. you cannot move say, firefox from one monitor to the other). They claimed they couldn't see why anyone would use that...!!!

Their website sucks. I can't retrieve my product key through there. Several people who have owned Parallels are now moving to VMWare.

 

I have a MBP that I run Parallels on. I'm kind of a glutton for speed and with the low voltage processor in the Air, I'm not sure I could take it. Plus, with only an 80 gig hard drive, it wouldn't be big enough for my needs. I'm hoping this will change in the next few months, because I'd love to take an Air on the road with me instead of the MBP.

 

When Leopard came out, Parallels was having some issues with compatibility, whereas Fusion seemed to be Leopard compatible right off the bat. I bought Fusion and was preparing to upgrade my Macbook Pro to Leopard and switch over to Leopard, but just for the heck of it, I decided to try Parallels with Leopard. They had recently come out with a "more" compatible Leopard version. Not surprisingly, it worked great with Leopard, so I never really installed or used Fusion.

After reading the speed tests between Parallels and Fusion when running Vista, my next move will be to run Vista under Fusion and keep running XP under Parallels. Since Fusion utilizes both cores of the Core 2 Duo, it runs Vista much faster than Parallels. I've tried Vista under Parallels and there are certain things that are painfully slow to me. I went back to XP until something changes... Vista SP1, an update to Parallels, or switching over to Fusion. I guess it will be both SP1 and Fusion for me.

 

I just bought the macbook air about a week ago and really love it (except for a few really annoying things like I can't get the ALT key to work in a terminal). I believe that it's a great laptop for office type work. The keyboard is great as well as the screen.

In terms of performance, I'm sure that you'll feel that the MBA is a lot more enjoyable to use than the sony TZ with vista installed, especially if you have the base model. The air's hdd is not fast, but you probably won't really notice it since you'll rarely have to reboot and the operating system is good at keeping the applications you most frequently use in ram. In my case my home desktop is a relatively fast machine running ubuntu 7.10 with fast hdds, and the mba's speed seems perfectly fine.


If you're thinking of getting the ssd version, you better read some reviews like anand's: http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3226 . I was originally thinking about the ssd since the slow hdd really worried me, but I was shocked to see that in many cases the ssd is in fact the slowest option.

As for virtualization, if you are just wanting to run microsoft office, I'd highly recommend that you just use the 2008 mac version. In my understanding, even if you use parallels or fusion, you still have to do a complete install of a microsoft operating system so there wouldn't necessarily be any disk space gains. It's pretty much the same thing as bootcamp, except that windows is installed on a virtual file system (which is nice because you can just copy one file to copy the whole windows installation). In my case, I'm running vmware server on my ubuntu desktop (2GB ram, 2.4GHz dual core athlon) and performance is fine. I have not installed fusion on my MBA yet.

Hope this helps,
Good luck!