CrossOver Support - Community Forums

I need to run one particular Windows-only program quite frequently on my MacBook. I have Parallels installed, which works great, but it's a real resource hog and really works best when it's one of a very few things running. (The machine's RAM is already maxed out.) In this situation I need pretty much a full working Macintosh environment as well, so Parallels is inconvenient at best. My question is simple - how does Crossover compare to the VM solutions when it comes to memory and CPU demands? I would think that it's much less demanding, but before I go to the trouble of setting everything up I'm wondering if anyone can shed some light on this. Thanks -

Well, why don't you run some tests and see. I know that Parallels/VMware will automatically allocate the RAM that the environment needs and won't give it back. So if you are using say 512MB for your Win98 virtual machine, that 512 is taken regardless of what is running in it. I beleive that CrossOver takes and releases only what it needs memorywise.

I keep the Pref Pane "Menu Meters" running all the time on my machine with the CPU use displayed so I can see what is using what. But you could just open up the Activity Monitor as well to see what is doing what, both for RAM and CPU.

When I get back from lunch I might try VMWare vs CrossOver with an app I have installed in both to see what results I get.

Ok... Doing some tests now. CrossOver very obviously uses a much smaller footprint than a VM would from what I can see.

It does use a good chunk of CPU and such when it's launching apps but once it settles it's pretty small over all.

I am using MS Office 97 components for my test. I checked RAM and CPU use before, after launching CrossOver and then after launching MS Excel and MS Word and for the most part I have most of my resources still available to me. My CPU meters never spike over 10% on both cores after the 2 apps are running except as I switch between windows and such. (I've also got Safari, Skitch, and some background tasks running). Overall the computer is just as responsive as it was without CrossOver and the apps running.

Sadly, Safari is eating up more memory than CrossOver does :D

With VMWare and Parallels, I lose almost total control of the computer while it launches and restores the current VM, esp with XP. And it's using up almost a GB of RAM between its misc apps and the OS inside itself. I have 512MB inside of my VMs for 98 and XP and both have similar usage on the Mac. They gobble up well over a GB of RAM and tend to use my processors at 10-80% depending on what I am doing in them. This doesn't include the fact that from launch to opening of the OS and then running apps, it takes 3-4 minutes before I can use the VM at all. VS CrossOver which is usable in about 30 seconds.

If you don't mind sharing, what app is it that you use? Some apps just play nicer than others and/or need less resources. That is one of the beautiful things about CrossOver/WINE, you only use what the app needs and nothing more. VS a VM where the OS gobbles up resources for itself regardless of the apps you are running.

If the app runs perfectly/acceptably in CrossOver, I say it's worth the trouble to try it.

Don't mind sharing at all! It's Real Legal's E-Transcript Viewer, downloadable here - http://www.reallegal.com/techsupportEtranViewer.asp

This article, http://www.themaclawyer.com/the_mac_lawyer/2007/11/how-to-work-wit.html, recommends Crossover as the OS X solution. I could run Parallels in Coherence mode and it would look and work fine but I'd be running most of the time with no spare RAM and have to endure lots of disk swapping, etc.

You're confirming my suspicion, which is that the WINE option can be a bit more targeted in its use of resources. This is a simple program (I think) and its demands should be pretty modest.

Robn is essentially right - CrossOver does NOT consume a huge fixed amount of memory like Parallels or VMware. We do not run a Windows operating system, which makes CrossOver considerably more memory friendly.

Essentially, when the Win32 app requests, say, 100kb of memory, we forward the request to MacOS. MacOS allocates the memory, and we pass it to the application. So a Windows application in CrossOver allocates and releases memory like every other Mac app does.

This is very helpful. When I get time I will install the demo version and test this out. Thanks so much for the assistance.

I tried install it for myself, just to see how it runs and I could not get past the legal speak part without a little trickery. I click "I Accept" and the Next button does not appear clickable. I then tried scrolling down to the end, as some legal stuff requires, still nothing. Note that for me the scroll stuff was kind of odd behavior wise. It was a little slow to respond then kept scrolling on it's own until I clicked again in the window area below the text.

I found the key was to click "I Accept", scroll down to the end, then hit "Back". Then hit "Next" again and it should then let you click the "Next" button on the legal screen and do the install.

Once installed, I downloaded a sample "signed" document off their site and it opened no problem. The interface has some draw issues while using it but seems to be functional and should do the trick for your needs.

The one thing I was not sure how to do was to convert it to a PDF. I could easily print it to my Mac printer, make a .prn file for printing from OS X, but I don't have any form of PDF converter installed into the bottle that I installed the reader into.

Hope this helps.

r