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Memory Upgrade for macbook air 2014

S

salmanilatron

Junior Member
Hello all,

I am planning on purchasing the mac book air and want to run two OS on it. Would it be wise to stay with the 1.4GHz processor and upgrade RAM to 8GB? I will be primarily using it for school so there won't be any intense usage.

Thanks!
 
Do you mean that you want to dual-boot (like with bootcamp) or do you mean that you want to run OS X and run virtual machines simultaneously?
 
Ok, but do you want to dual-boot, or do you want to run Mavericks while running a windows7 virtual machine?

You could probably get away with 4 GB if you're doing the former, depending on what sort of things you're doing. I wouldn't do the latter without 8 GB.
 
Sorry I am like super computer illiterate, so I have no clue what you just said 🙂 I was planning on using Parallels to install Windows 7 on the macbook. I want to be able to switch from one to the other.
 
In general, will I see a difference between the 4 and 8gb of ram with the processor? Is there even a relationship between the two?
 
Sorry I am like super computer illiterate, so I have no clue what you just said I was planning on using Parallels to install Windows 7 on the macbook. I want to be able to switch from one to the other.
Click to expand...

Ah, well that helps me out. Parallels recommends at least 4 GB of RAM for running a virtual machine. I would go with 8 GB if it's in your budget.

RAM helps mostly for running big programs (like a virtual machine) or large data sets (photo or video editing, excessive browser tabs). Having enough, or more than enough, RAM makes sure that your CPU isn't wasting cycles waiting for data to get read from pagefile/disk. Even SSDs are orders of magnitude slower than RAM.

Here's a good read:
http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-infinite-space-between-words/

and here's the punchline if you're impatient, first column is absolute time, 2nd column is time normalized to 1 cpu cycle = 1 second.
Main memory access: 120 ns 6 min
Solid-state disk I/O: ~100 μs ~days
Click to expand...
 
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