I have a class coming up starting January 5 I will need widows 7. I use a Mac and do not want to use 7 but most of the work will be done learning the lower levels of the Microsoft OS.
I have been planing to use VMware or Parallels. My Question is I don't want Window open all the time and I do not want to slow down my mac with windows in the background. I would like to have it open on a 2nd desk top using lion. Can I do this with out full integration just have Widows running on the side? How will this change my Mac I like to keep it very simple, well backed up and clean. I will use Mac most of the time writing reports and searching the web just need windows for the OS.
I always found in Windows that things got lost, were running at low levels or there was just some crap I did not wont on there. Can this happen on the mac? What if anything are mac users using to do this, keep Mac clean and being productive doing most of the work on the Lion side?
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"Oh Man I have to use windows on my iMac"
Are you looking to dual boot the OS or run it entirely in a virtual machine?
With any Virtual Machine desktop product I've used your ram automatically get's decreased based on the specs of the machine. Despite recommended Windows 7 settings you can get by using 1GB ram pending on how you're going to use Windows. If you're not going to be doing heavy multi-tasking in Windows you will be fine with 1GB of ram. How you set up the VM is going to be greatly determined by what you need it to do and even beyond that you may find yourself tweaking it a bit.
I was using VMWare Fusion 4 and found it giving me a lot of issues over time. I switched to Virtual Box and found the experience to be much better. A nice benefit of Fusion though was I could open the VM on a different desktop and set it to full screen mode and easily switch from OSX to the VM via gesture swiping.
With any Virtual Machine desktop product I've used your ram automatically get's decreased based on the specs of the machine. Despite recommended Windows 7 settings you can get by using 1GB ram pending on how you're going to use Windows. If you're not going to be doing heavy multi-tasking in Windows you will be fine with 1GB of ram. How you set up the VM is going to be greatly determined by what you need it to do and even beyond that you may find yourself tweaking it a bit.
I was using VMWare Fusion 4 and found it giving me a lot of issues over time. I switched to Virtual Box and found the experience to be much better. A nice benefit of Fusion though was I could open the VM on a different desktop and set it to full screen mode and easily switch from OSX to the VM via gesture swiping.
I have been looking at VMWare Fusion and Parallels. Both look good, My big thing is I dont want to mess to much with this Mac yet I am new to the Mac OS and am still learning what not todo. I worry that it will get to hard for me to manage all the crap and end up like a windows machine.
When you create a VM with any of the software mentioned it asks you to choose a HDD size which just creates a file of that size under /documents/Virtual Machines. If you uninstall the virtual software you can just delete that file to reclaim the drive space.
As someone else mentioned the VM runs completely sandboxed in it's own environment and doesn't interact directly with OSX. Meaning if you install Office inside your Windows VM it resides inside that VM and only in that VM.
As someone else mentioned the VM runs completely sandboxed in it's own environment and doesn't interact directly with OSX. Meaning if you install Office inside your Windows VM it resides inside that VM and only in that VM.
It's my understanding that the Windows installation will be sandboxed entirely-keeping your Mac OS untouched. I've only used VirtualBox for this sort of thing, but I can't imagine you wouldn't be able to launch Windows as if it was an application in and of itself: windowed, isolated, positionable and closable.
A few things will be impacted by running Win7 on your Mac. HD space, ram, & CPU.
The good thing is by running something like Virtualbox you can reasonably control how much of these resources get allocated.
That said you will see an overall hit in performance while the VM is running. But you don't have to run it all the time. Looks like you have a newer iMac so the hit should be minimal.
You can run Win7 in a seperate window and dedicate it to a desktop in OSX Spaces. There are features to make the VM feel more integrated with OSX, but if you dont want this just turn it off.
Same goes for files, most VMs have features to share files across the VM and OSX, but this again can be disabled.
The good thing is by running something like Virtualbox you can reasonably control how much of these resources get allocated.
That said you will see an overall hit in performance while the VM is running. But you don't have to run it all the time. Looks like you have a newer iMac so the hit should be minimal.
You can run Win7 in a seperate window and dedicate it to a desktop in OSX Spaces. There are features to make the VM feel more integrated with OSX, but if you dont want this just turn it off.
Same goes for files, most VMs have features to share files across the VM and OSX, but this again can be disabled.
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