Older iMacs and VMWare Fusion -- memory impact?

[147798]

Does anyone have experience with VMWare fusion? Here's my issue:

Currently I have a 17" 1.83GHz iMac topped out at 2GB RAM (early 06 model). It really is fine for me (maybe the HDD is a bit small). But, I have to assign 1GB to my VMWare app (Quicken) to make it run OK. So, when I run VMWare, the rest of my iMac grinds to a halt, and my memory only shows about 275MB free and never goes below. So, I'm assuming I'm hitting the disk swap memory limit.

I can't afford a brand-new alum iMac, but I do have an opportunity to get a late 2006 20" iMac for cheap, that would get me 3GB. If I did this, will this REALLY help me with my VM experience? Will that extra 1GB make the difference, or is VMWare just a slow app that will pig up my system, no matter how much RAM I have?

Any help is appreciated.

 

[themoonisdown09]

I haven't used VMWare Fusion, but I use Parallels. When I went from 2GB of RAM to 4GB of RAM, it made a big difference on performance.

 

[ddeadserious]

I fully understand how you feel. My early 06 MBP has a 2GB RAM limit, and when I'm running VMWare, OSX grinds to a halt, even with only 512MB allocated to XP.

I'd say go for any kind of upgrade you can - an extra gig will definitely help.

 

[yahoodlums]

I'm sure it will help a lot as you are effectively running two OS at the same time.

 

[147798]

I haven't used VMWare Fusion, but I use Parallels. When I went from 2GB of RAM to 4GB of RAM, it made a big difference on performance.

Thanks for the feedback. It sounds like you have a newer mac or macbook?

 

[George Carlin]

I have a newer iMac and had to upgrade the ram to 4gb to make Fusions happy. Under my normal workload i only have 500mb of ram available so 2gb won't cut it.