8gb RAM enough to run a windows app and mac apps all together?

[Kasramhdz]

Hi everyone
I am absolutely mesmerized by the m1 mac books and I want to jump ships from windows to mac
I can only afford the 8gb rig though
But there is one problem: I need to run Foxitphantom pdf for windows on it. I'm a medical student and throughout the years I have made thousands of annotations in tens of books including hundreds of links to locally saved images, videos and other pdf files.
So the problem is that I assume these local links wont work in macos environment. Thus I either have to use parallel or crossover to run the foxit for windows to be able to use those links.
I also frequently use R and adobe illustrator
I'm afraid the 8gb RAM wont be enough to constantly run Foxit for windows on parallel/crossover and use R and illustrator and also browse internet all at the same time.

 

[casperes1996]

I hate to do this, but I must advice against this, if running Windows software is ultimately a requirement. Crossover can't run everything and Parallels is a beta product virtualising ARM Windows which may also struggle with your program regardless - Microsoft's equivalent to Rosetta 2 is not on par with Rosetta.

At the very least I would suggest a form of tryout if possible; If you know a friend with an M1 who can test the parallels workflow or something.
Regular annotated PDFs will be read fine by macOS itself, and you can also annotate PDFs just using the built-in macOS app, Preview, but without knowing, yeah, I would suspect your file links might not work

R and Illustrator are no problems, and outside of working with large datasets that of course use memory appropriate for the data, RStudio doesn't really take up that much memory.

I wouldn't worry so much about the memory if I were you as I would the compatibility with your software workflow. 8GB is indeed not a lot for fully virtualising Windows while perhaps still running things in macOS like Illustrator, but by all accounts the M1s don't suffer very much when low on memory anyway; If I were to guess, in large parts because of their incredibly wide out of order reorder queue.

 

[mj_]

Here's the bottom line: If you need to run virtual machines on any Mac I would definitely suggest a 16GB model. However, given that you cannot currently run x86 operating systems on your Macs without processor-intensive emulation (UTM comes to mind) and neither Parallels nor VMware Fusion are emulators but merely Ring 0 hypervisors dependent on hardware virtualization support (Intel VT-x or AMD-V) I would advise against getting an M1 Mac if running a Windows application is cricital or important to you.

 

[Kasramhdz]

Thanks for the quick and comprehensive responses. I can pretty much run everything I need on macos as well. But the prospect of losing all of those local links makes me think twice about before to mac.
I'm sorry if it's too specific or unrelated to the topic, but is there a way to change all of the links within a pdf file in batch?
The links are all relative so I guess that the only problem would be the fact that windows uses "\" to separate folders and mac uses "/"
for example the relative link is like this in windows:
..\..\med\cardiology\image.jpg

Is there anyway to change all of the "\" to "/" ?

It would be a real bummer to miss out on macos because of bunch of slashes!

 

[LuisN]

Thanks for the quick and comprehensive responses. I can pretty much run everything I need on macos as well. But the prospect of losing all of those local links makes me think twice about before to mac.
I'm sorry if it's too specific or unrelated to the topic, but is there a way to change all of the links within a pdf file in batch?
The links are all relative so I guess that the only problem would be the fact that windows uses "\" to separate folders and mac uses "/"
for example the relative link is like this in windows:
..\..\med\cardiology\image.jpg

Is there anyway to change all of the "\" to "/" ?

It would be a real bummer to miss out on macos because of bunch of slashes!

There's a foxit pdf reader for Mac if all what you want is being able to read your existent pdfs: https://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf-reader/