I am running XP on VMware 2.01 and I was wondering what are the best settings to run it at. Is their a downside to have it running 2 cpus and max ram as well? Will OSX go really slugish? It says something about memory swapping occuring, what is this?
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Ideal VMware settings
- Thread starter greenguy4
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Give us some specs on what Mac you're running it on. Also, what settings are you trying to set up on the VM?
Swap means using the hard drive as RAM when you run out of RAM.
Swap means using the hard drive as RAM when you run out of RAM.
You need more RAM to make anything run any faster.
With 2GB of RAM, I wouldn't set the VM to have anymore than 648MB of RAM max, while 512MB being suggested for OS X performance.
With 2GB of RAM, I wouldn't set the VM to have anymore than 648MB of RAM max, while 512MB being suggested for OS X performance.
With 4GB, you should be fine setting it to 2GB. As for how many CPUs it uses, since your Mac only has 2 "CPUs" (cores, actually), I wouldn't set it to any more than 1 CPU in the VM.
This is a good recommendation, I typically allocate between 2GB to 4GB, but I have 8GB in my machine so it allows me. Generally you shouldn't have more then 50% of your cores available to your VMs, and no more then 75% of your total ram allocated to your VMs provided you have at least 2GB available to OSX.
RAM allocation is important, but if you can, move your VM to a drive other than your OSX system drive, to spread the IO. I have a 2GB MBP, and allocate 1GB to XP. When running from separate hard drives, the two machines are noticeably quicker than when running on the same drive.
Not sure what the optimal settings would be, but when I decided to give it a try on my Mac Pro, I bought a separate 500GB hard drive and added 4GB of RAM to my existing 6GB. I was planning to upgrade my RAM anyway, so I didn't give the full increment to Win7. I'm now running Win7 under VMware Fusion 2.0 on the separate 500GB drive, with 2GB of RAM allocated, w/ one processor. It runs very fast, faster than I probably need it to, given that I don't need it for much other than Excel (the Mac version doesn't support VB or macros). It runs a LOT faster than XP does on my work-issued two year-old IBM T43 w/ 1GB of RAM. A LOT faster.