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My MacBook Pro 13" has been extremely sluggish ever since I started working my new job earlier this year, to the point it significantly affects my productivity. I have finally decided to do something about it this weekend as I have enough time to work on a major upgrade now.

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There are three things I am doing to unleash the full potential of this laptop:

  • replacing HDD with SSD
  • reinstalling OS X Mavericks on the Mac itself (would've gone for Yosemite as I usually like to be bleeding edge, but I've already read about how there is no VMware support yet so can't run the latest Mac OS at the moment)
  • reinstalling Windows 7 Professional for my virtual machine, which runs on the Mac

Previously, I tended to work in the guest operating system most of the time: Windows 7 (32-bit) with 2 GB of memory allocated to this VM. The other 6 GB of RAM were left for the host OS (OS X Mavericks). Both the Mac host operating system and Windows 7 guest operating system have been handed down from user to user over the years, so performance has gradually degraded over time.

So far, I have replaced the original mechanical hard drive with an SSD (Samsung 840 Evo Series MZ-7TE250BW 250GB) and done a clean install of Mavericks. This has already brought the boot time of the host OS down from 2 minutes to just under 25 seconds! It's hard to know how much credit goes to the SSD and how much goes to the fact OS X was clean installed, but I'm glad I did both.

Question 1:

How much of my Mac's 8 GB of RAM should I allocate to the Windows 7 virtual machine?

Question 2:

Should I install 32-bit or 64-bit Windows 7 for the virtual machine? If I allocate less than 4 GB of RAM to the VM, then I'm guessing it won't make sense to install the 64-bit version of Windows 7. Ordinarily, I would just put 32-bit on without even giving it a second thought but one of my colleges reinstalled his Windows 7 VM last week (same model Mac as me but without the SSD) and he is convinced going 64-bit helped him. Incidentally, he set his VM to use half of his RAM: 4 GB.

Looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts on this!

Austin ''Danger'' Powers
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2 Answers2

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Answer 1: It depends. Where is it that you primarily work? Windows? Does your work require memory? If so, allocate 6 GB to your VM. Otherwise, use 4 GB. Unless you’re only doing Notepad-y stuff, then 2 GB is fine. Otherwise, it absolutely isn’t.

Answer 2: Well, if it’s less than ~3.6 GB, yes. VMs suffer from the same effects like a real PC, so you can’t fully utilize more 4 GB of RAM with a 32-bit OS.

user219095
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IMO, swapping HD to SSD made the difference, not the reinstall of the OS.

To bypass Qs 1 & 2 entirely - did you consider running Windows from Bootcamp rather than in VM. It would be considerably faster & then 64-bit would make far more sense.

Partial answer to 1 & 2 would be... at 4GB [windows] RAM, there is very marginal gain from a 64-bit OS, at the risk of it getting greedy with memory & wanting to page all the time, which from a VM would be staggeringly slow. 32-bit would be 'safer' in that respect, though would cap RAM at about 3.6GB.

Tetsujin
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