Apple Mac - wowcher

datostar

Heedtheadvice wrote: »

Take care you do not buy one with fixed SSD that is too small. Stores have been selling these with just 30GB or so drives. you soon find that there is only 3-5GB of space left with a few progs installed and a small amount of user data stored. 32bit versions of win 10 seem less of an issue at the moment - but for how long? - 64bit ones a definite problem!
They are a right swine when windows tries to update (which it will!) and you just run out of space on the drive as the automatic downloads just nearly fill up the drive and then leave insufficient space to update windows. You end up with outdated windows, loss of security and functionality fixes etc.



There is a work around - but it is a right swine to do for those who are non too technical !!

You're dead right there. I just installed Win 7 Pro 64 bit from an .iso in a VM on an iMac. I'd set it up with 48GB disk space and 2GB memory (from the 16GB on the iMac). It downloaded no less than 199 updates, just short of 1GB then ran out of memory while installing them. I had to exit, then temporarily increase the memory to 4GB to get it to finish. That's an extreme situation, admittedly, but some of these 32GB or so little laptops are coming with only 2GB memory which could pose a problem too.

onomatopoeia99

datostar wrote: »

You're dead right there. I just installed Win 7 Pro 64 bit from an .iso in a VM on an iMac. I'd set it up with 48GB disk space and 2GB memory (from the 16GB on the iMac). It downloaded no less than 199 updates, just short of 1GB then ran out of memory while installing them. I had to exit, then temporarily increase the memory to 4GB to get it to finish. That's an extreme situation, admittedly, but some of these 32GB or so little laptops are coming with only 2GB memory which could pose a problem too.

2GB is normally more than enough for the x64 version of Windows 7. I used to run it natively on my old Mac Mini with 1GB RAM. I had flattened OSX and replaced it with Windows, I wasn't running a hypervisor.

datostar

onomatopoeia99 wrote: »

2GB is normally more than enough for the x64 version of Windows 7. I used to run it natively on my old Mac Mini with 1GB RAM. I had flattened OSX and replaced it with Windows, I wasn't running a hypervisor.

It is now - I've changed the allocation back to 2GB after the temporary increase to 4. The Win 7 SP1 .iso has never been updated since issue so a new installation is going to be hit with almost 1GB of updates. I suppose if you can't increase the memory you could download the updates in batches by unticking a proportion in the Control Panel/Updates. Interestingly, the Win 10 Pro installation with several programs installed occupies 14.5GB in the VM: The newly-installed clean Win 7 Pro occupies 20.7GB. That might have implications for limited spec. laptops. I find Win 10 loads and runs faster too.