Windows XP running thru Parallels on MBA

[acutabove]

I know that its possible to do this - run Windows XP thru Parallels on a Macbook Air - but what Im concerned about is the performance. I had previously bought a Macbook Air (1st gen, 1.6Ghz 80Gb) and to be quite honest I was disappointed with how the graphics performed on that machine. Even little things like how choppy the dock icons animate are noticeable and even without doing anything, the MBA seems to lag. Obviously a lot of this points towards the crappy Intel graphics card the previous MBA had.

The question now would be, has anyone who bought the 2nd gen MBA ran Windows thru Parallels? If so, what was the performance like? Btw, Im not looking to play games on the MBA (it was a pain to see the graphics crawl on the previous MBA) just normal use - acceptable internet use, email, word processing, and spreadsheets.

Please mention ur MBA specs and Parallels version as well. Thanks!

[michl]

You really won't find many people running any kind of virtualization software on the Macbook Air... (given that it is known to be the slowest Mac on the market).

Well the mid-2009 MBA model has a CPU nominally 15% faster than the previous 2008 model, and 33% faster than the original MBA, if that helps. However, according to this Everymac article, tests have shown the latest MBA to be actually slower than the previous model(!)

Otherwise one can find actual user comments on the Parallels forums, for instance. Also this review seems to offer valuable user opinions. And here too. And so on...

[acutabove]

Very interesting articles indeed. Although most of the feedbacks in the forums seem to point out that its fine to run Parallels even on the old MBA - a point that I absolutely disagree with. If it was an issue with my MBA, I wouldnt know now. Perhaps the best way to check this is to go straight to iStyle and let them run Parallels on one of the demo MBA units. Thanks again!

[fangpyre]

I'm with Michl.
My recommendation is to run it thru Boot Camp.

[Magnus]

I would agree with the others. You can run Parallels, Fusion etc on MBA but not sure you want to. Booting into Windows with Bootcamp should be much less painful even though it requires reboot.

I use a first gen MBA every day as my 'carry-around-everywhere-reporters-notebook' and it's fine for writing, email, web browsing, Twitter etc, but that's about it. I've not tried to run Windows on it though. I guess I could but not sure when I'll get around to doing that.

[michl]

Perhaps the best way to check this is to go straight to iStyle and let them run Parallels on one of the demo MBA units.

No harm asking... But bear in mind that Parallels Desktop must be installed and run from the Mac hard drive. Which may be a serious hindrance in that case. (Would be much easier to just bring in a USB drive with the software to try on it...)