<p>I’m looking at buying a Macbook Pro, and I’m going into engineering so I want to run Windows XP via VMWare for all the PC-only engineering software. (more convenient than bootcamp)</p>
<p>How resource-intensive is this? Would 2GB of RAM be enough or should I upgrade to 4? (Btw, why is Apple’s RAM upgrade like 4x more expensive than a third-party)</p>
<p>Get Fusion… it’s nice, and get 4gb of ram, but buy it from Newegg.com instead of Apple and put it in yourself!</p>
<p>If you’re going this route, get Parallels instead of Fusion, it’s 100x better. </p>
<p>As for the RAM, I run Linux on my computer and use Virtualbox to run XP, and my 2Gb RAM performs fine when I give 512MB RAM to XP, or even 1GB, which is more than enough for a VM. </p>
<p>Apple’s RAM is more expensive because they like to make $$$ and know that most people are too afraid to add RAM themselves or don’t even know you can do that or that Apple’s RAM upgrades are overpriced. If you really want more RAM, buy the MBP with the minimum amount of RAM possible and add it yourself with RAM from Newegg.</p>
<p>Or better yet, don’t get a Mac 
I recently bought a $900 HP dv9700t (17" screen @ 1680x1050 resolution, 2 GHz Core 2 Duo, 3GB RAM, 250GB HDD, DVD-RW drive, 256MB NVIDIA graphics card, Bluetooth, webcam, microphone, fingerprint reader). An MBP with similar specs would be ~$3000. Definitely not worth it, and if you want enterprise quality, a Thinkpad will give you that for about $1500 (though I can’t really compare as there isn’t a 17" Thinkpad). </p>
<p>Anywho, getting a Mac for engineering is like getting a PC for journalism or art.</p>
<p>Actually, I think Fusion is a much better product, and the install process is much more streamlined than parallels. I’ve had parallels crash multiple times on me, but Fusion has yet to do so.</p>
<p>As for mac vs pc for engineering, just get both. I’ve got a Macbook Pro for my personal use, and the school where I’m attending requires to buy their laptop, so I’ll have an additional, winblows for any engineering stuff (although you can get most of the same programs for mac anyways).</p>
<p>hmm, that’s weird, from my experience, it’s quite solid. are you sure it wasn’t just the 'doze crashing and bringing down parallels with it? :P</p>