Mac Mini, 1GB of ram... Parallels???

[Bob Knob]

If this will works then I can kill the last PC at the office that is not in the accounting department...

There is one user not in accounting that from time to time needs to access QuickBooks, she's actually a Mac user at heart but she is stuck on an old Windows box. We have one Mac Mini (1.83 Intel Core Duo) currently unused that has 1GB of ram. The only Windows app it will need to run is QuickBooks (and that will be very rare). On the OSX side she will more then likely need to have FileMaker open at the same time, but that is it for big resource hogs.

What are your thoughts/experiences, how should the performance be?
Too sluggish?
Usable?
No problem?

Long story... it has to be Parallels rather than VMWare.
Adding more ram right now is not an option, but could be in the future.
Can a Mac Mini have non-matching (GB) ram?

Thanks for all feedback.

 

[Eidorian]

It's very usable in my department. Just expect to see a lot of page outs. Our current XP virtual machine has between 320-384 MB allocated to it out of 1 GB.

Not that most people care about page outs.

 

[Osarkon]

Should be alright. Not lightning quick, but certainly useable.

 

[iSee]

I second what the others said. The XP virtual machine should be fine with 384MB allocated to it, which will leave plenty for running FileMaker. 384MB is also plenty on XP if you are only running that one app. I ran XP with 256MB for quite a while in fact (it wasn't SP2, but still).

Long story... it has to be Parallels rather than VMWare.
Adding more ram right now is not an option, but could be in the future.
Can a Mac Mini have non-matching (GB) ram?

I've read repeatedly that the integrated GPU in the Mini works much better (faster) with matched pairs of DIMMs. I've had my eye out for benchmarks on this, but I've haven't seen any yet so I don't know exactly how important this is. Apple makes a big point of it on their web site (something like, "highly recommended for best performance") and won't even let you configure a Mini without matched pairs.