I have really been trying hard to use a MacBook Pro (Intel) as my primary laptop at work. Being a network engineer in an all Windows environment has made this transition a very frustrating one to say the least. My main source of frustration has been performance, or lack thereof, of the Windows virtual machines running in Fusion. The MacBook Pro I have been using only has 2 GB of RAM and supposedly only goes up to 3 GB (I am still researching this). Needless to say, this was a huge part of the problem in successfully running the Windows VM’s in the background.
On Monday of this week I bought a 2 GB stick of RAM on sale from Microcenter for $30 to bump the memory on the Mac up to its proverbial ceiling of 3 GB. This has made all the difference so far. I am now able to run Windows Vista with a full 1GB of memory and OSX still has 2 GB all to its self. In addition, I found this post http://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2008/09/optimizing-vist.html which gave me some nice tweaks to the Vista VM and now the whole system is running even better than with just the memory upgrade. It still isn’t as fast as I would like it to be or as fast as my Thinkpad T60p running Vista but I am definitely not giving up the ghost just yet.
If I can just disparage the rumors that my MacBook Pro doesn’t go past the 3 GB of memory claimed I might just be a convert after all.
