Which windows version should I choose

[hellorom1]

Hi,

I have a macbook late 2009,mac os 10.6.4 : 2Gb of ram and 2,26 GHz core2duo processor.
As I haven't a powerful mac, my question is to know which version of windows should I use ? Windows 7 or Windows XP ?
I will use virtualbox with programs like ETABS and ADINA (finite elements).
Moreover, do you think that Bootcamp will be a better solution in my case ?

Thank you for your response! (and sorry for my bad english)

[Sasquatch]

It all depends on what the programs require, where they run on (little use to have W7 when it runs only on XP) and what you can get. A Mac from late 2009 should be more than capable of running W7 as a VM. My 4 year old PC runs it just fine! It does have a 2,8 GHz dual core CPU and I gave it 3 GB of RAM. If you're concerned about RAM, you can always add some, it's cheap. Unless it needs that funky, very expensive Apple branded type.

And most important of all, which version do YOU want to run?

[hellorom1]

hi, thank you for your response!

ram may be cheap but I don't know which kind should I buy and I don't have the tool to open the mac and change it.
I don't care which version I run, both are OK with my programs so I ask because I thought with Xp instead of W7 I will need less ram isn't it? and with a not powerful processor, xp will be better too isn't it?
I think that the best is to install Xp on bootcamp and use it with virtualbox, what do you think of this?

[Sasquatch]

Personally, I would go with Windows 7. Why? It's more secure, more recent, has longer support compared to XP (that's almost to it's end) and you can still buy it. XP is no longer for sale.

As for the RAM part, I run my XP VMs with 512 MB and my W7 is set on 768 MB. Both perform roughly the same. If you are unable to open the machine for additional RAM, you can always go to a Mac store and ask there.