MacBook Air?

[Paperlantern]

I'm about to be issued a hand-me-down Air from work. I'm not 100% sure what version or whatever it is, im relatively new to the Apple scene as far as laptops, however Ive heard rumors of overheating and or video issues. Its a 2.13 GHz machine with 2GB of RAM. At least a year old I would say, dude upgraded to one of the newer Airs, so I'm getting his old one.

Will this machine still be able to run a VM Ware or Parallels Windows/Linux machine when I need it without too much trouble? Figuring 1GB to host and 1GB to guest. Its not an amazing machine, but its a little better than the old 3.4GHz Hyperthreaded Dell monster with 1.25GB of RAM I have now. Monster as in it weighs like 11 pounds.

I can run a virtual box winxp VM on this one without too much trouble, so I figure the Air could handle it, im just worried about these rumors i've seen floating around these forums and others about the older Airs having issues. Any feedback will be good on what to expect.

Also, what flavor Mac OS should i wipe and reload with?

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

Put Snow Leopard on there.

 

[Paperlantern]

That's what I was thinking of doing honestly, but didnt know if i needed anything slightly older for this guy or not. Like I said I am a bit of a Mac OS newbie. Been using Windows for a decade and a half and Linux for years as well, but I only had an OLD G3 back in about 2004ish which had a relatively early version of OSX on it. I didnt use it much since it was a 350MHz proc with about 128MB of RAM when everything else was pushing 2GHz and 1GB of RAM. Experience before that was troubleshooting OS9 back in early to late 2000 setting up dial up connections over the phone. So, bluntly, I am certainly a Mac Newb, but several users at our firm use Mac and I want to be able to support it more thoroughly, that's why my job is issuing me this machine, and I want to get as much out of it as possible.

Any other advice is welcome as well.

 

[Paperlantern]

Snow Leopard installed and I'll tell you what, I'm liking this thing. I can run a VM with little effort, it starts up and shuts down incredibly fast. Screen looks good. Keyboard feels good. Its going to be difficult to use another brand of laptop going forward.

 

[Eug]

Do you really need 1 GB for XP? For basic stuff you can get away with 512 MB or even less.

 

[TheStu]

Snow Leopard installed and I'll tell you what, I'm liking this thing. I can run a VM with little effort, it starts up and shuts down incredibly fast. Screen looks good. Keyboard feels good. Its going to be difficult to use another brand of laptop going forward.

That's how they get ya.

 

[Paperlantern]

Do you really need 1 GB for XP? For basic stuff you can get away with 512 MB or even less.

Actually no, I did ratchet it back to 768MB, and was thinking of going to around 512 being that the most intensive thing I will prolly do with it would be remote desktop while running an instance of Ambercat Helpdesk (no mac version of this). So yeah, no, I dont need 1GB to the VM at all.

Virtual box runs nicely, Ive been using it for a while in Linux and its just as solid in Mac OS, if not more so.

Yeah, theyve got me, heh. I'm not going to abandon all other hardware and software or anything, but I do like this thing so far.

 

[Tyranicus]

I do over-the-phone tech support and frequently have to walk people through things in Windows XP. As such, I have a VM running pretty much all the time. I gave it 512MB of RAM, and it works just fine.

 

[Paperlantern]

Yeah im gonna drop it back to 512MB tonight if i use it, even though with 768 theres still plenty of room, no reason to use more than necessary.

 

[speg]

Snow Leopard installed and I'll tell you what, I'm liking this thing. I can run a VM with little effort, it starts up and shuts down incredibly fast. Screen looks good. Keyboard feels good. Its going to be difficult to use another brand of laptop going forward.

Muha. Welcome to the dark side. Does it have a SSD? I've been staying away from the Air because it's a bit less powerful, but the new ones with all solid state are pretty slick. Im planning to pick one up next refresh.

 

[Paperlantern]

Muha. Welcome to the dark side. Does it have a SSD? I've been staying away from the Air because it's a bit less powerful, but the new ones with all solid state are pretty slick. Im planning to pick one up next refresh.

Yes it has a 128GB SSD, when i need the XP VM, it boots in about 12 seconds. It's disgusting, I can't imagine a SSD on a machine with some REAL muscle, cuz like you said, its a little less powerful, but using it, its worlds faster than my old Dell laptop with a 3.2GHz processor in it and almost as much RAM.