Immigrant Professional General Hardware Recommendations
Immigrant Professional is designed to run on the Windows operating system, but will run on the Mac OS under conditions covered below.
We recommend a computer that can easily run several of your programs that you use at the same time without any significant degradation in performance.
You need to look at processor specifications and speed, as well as the amount of memory. The amount of memory allows for more programs to be open simultaneously, however adding more memory to an old computer will not do the job. As computers change, developers take advantage of the new features of the computer. Things that ran fine in the past may not with updates of the applications.
If you are looking to run this on a Apple computer (Mac), there are some additional considerations. You will still need to be able to run Windows on the Mac. There are some applications available (hosting software, VMWare and Parallels) that will host Windows on your Mac. However, they require a bit more from your computer. You will be running the Mac OS as well as the hosting software that will run Windows. We actually develop on a Mac that runs VMWare Fusion Pro. It runs well, however the machine is upper end.
You don’t need an upper end computer to run VMware, but you need one that can handle it with relative ease. For example the iMac I5 or I7 should be able to do very nicely with running Windows and Immigrant Professional. CPU’s with multiple cores are especially good at running VMWare and Parallels on the Mac.
If you choose to do this, please test your computer first. You can download a demo of Immigrant Professional from our website to test performance. The most cost effective way is to rent an Apple Mac for a day or two, to get a feel for it. Make sure that you can install VMWare or Parallels and our demo by asking the vendor.
We recommend not going with a low end computer. An iMac with a multiple core I5 or I7 and 12-16 GB memory should be fine. Some of the Mac laptops would be fine also, but the same specifications would apply, but always test it first.
Also, from our experience VMWare Fusion is a better choice than Parallels. In each of these you should not configure either to merge the Mac desktop with either VMWare or Parallels, rather have them run separately in their own window, you will still be able to copy files back and forth from Mac to Windows.
Vendor Specifications
Parallels
VMWare
(note these are minimum recommendations)