Once you've gone from the stock 4GB to 16GB, you can then throw a pantload of RAM at your Windows environment (using the Parallels preferences), which will then be available to your Windows applications. It's better to get all the benefit of going to 16GB in one jump, rather than upgrade from 4GB to 8GB, find out that it's not enough, then upgrade to 16GB and have to resell/trade in the 8GB. My recommendation to my clients is always to max out any machine with only two slots, rather than upgrade in smaller steps. RAM is the upgrade that gives the most bang for your buck, especially in laptops. Then, when you boot natively into Windows, Photoshop will behave according to standard Windows rules without being limited by Parallels' RAM cap.īut, since this is where you are now, this gives you a justification to do the no-brainer upgrade, and max out your RAM. Alternately, you could install Windows as a dual-boot OS using Apple's Boot Camp utility. You'd get better performance out of an OS X-native version of Photoshop, which would then take RAM as needed like a good OS X application. It sounds like you're running high-horsepower applications in the virtualized environment, which is not an ideal use.

In any case, you can't allocate more RAM to Windows than the Mac has installed, and it's a Very Bad Idea to give 100% of your RAM to a virtualized environment, leaving little or nothing for the boot OS. will all draw their RAM out of the Windows pool, rather than the larger pool available to the Mac. Depending on whether the Windows installation is 32-bit or 64-bit, you may be limited in the amount of RAM you can allocate to Windows. The first thing you should do is check the Parallels preferences for your Windows environment, and see how much RAM you've allocated to it. If you've authorized Windows Whatever to use 4GB RAM (for example), that 4GB is not available to the OS X environment until you shut down the Windows environment. The memory space for each virtualized OS is set in the Parallels preferences on an OS-by-OS basis. This virtualized environment also commands its own memory space, because the virtualized OS doesn't know it's not the boot OS. Parallels, like other virtualization middleware applications, runs an entirely different operating system with its own native applications.

16gb ram macbook pro upgrade