Windows XP on VMWare Fusion 2 too slow on MBA

[saisrujan]

Had been running my boot-camp Windows XP on my MBA using VMWare Fusion. A new version just got released, and I quickly upgraded.

After the upgrade, VM boot up takes for ever. Even after that, the performance is too poor. I tried uninstalling and re-installing VMWare tools, but the install doesn't complete.

Anyone else seeing this?

 

[saisrujan]

Back to 1.1.3 and back to normalcy. Phew!

When starting the VM on Fusion 2, the CPU is pegged to 100% for about 4 minutes while the Windows VM boots. Even once totally booted up, the VM still keeps the CPU busy at 50-60% even when nothing is actually being donw!

Also, as soon as the computer boots up, I was getting this error
avgcc.exe - The application failed to start because MFC71.DLL was not found.

Apparently, VMWare Tools somehow took that DLL for a ride. I didn't see the problem after I downgraded back to 1.1.3.

avgcc.exe is related to AVG Anti-virus. But I do not see the relation.

People who give Fusion 2 a try, please keep me posted on what you observe. I give up on Fusion 2 for now.

 

[Brendon Bauer]

I thought I was the only one... running it on a MacBook Pro here and heck this thing takes forever to boot up. I thought it was just because it was the first time using VMware Fusion 2.0 and it was updating or something... But apparently that isn't the case . I really hope they fix this... It'd be faster to just reboot in Bootcamp now

 

[kalex]

Weird.

I installed 2.0 clean (not upgrade) on macbook C2D 2.0 and it runs pretty fast without any issues. I'm running Tinyxp sp3 with 512mb ram assigned. No problems to report.

After you did the upgrade did you upgrade Vmware tools to new version?

 

[saisrujan]

After you did the upgrade did you upgrade Vmware tools to new version?

Yes I did, but it didn't seem to complete (I was still seeing the found new hardware notifications, which should disappear if all device drivers are properly installed). I guess that's where the problem is. Skimming through the VMWare Forums, most of the problems were caused by an incomplete install of VMWare Tools. But I did try uninstalling and re-installing the tools. That hung for ever. When i rebooted the VM and tried installing, it gave the error "An install script is currently running. Please complete that install" or something to that effect.

I was worried I was mucking with my VM (Since this is a boot-camp VM, I do not have the "snapshot" facility) so I gave up and was relieved when everything worked after downgrading to 1.1.3 and re-installing VMWare tools.

 

[kalex]

Yep sometimes vmware tools are a pain. i see this once in a while at my job on windows 2003 servers. Usually reboot seems to help with installation.
Windows has built in snapshots which are activated on every major install, if you didn't disable it. its called System restore. what you could have done was to boot into bootcamp and restore to right before when vmware tools were upgraded. but since you got it working, you should be fine

 

[saisrujan]

OK. I've never used system-restore before, so it never occurred to me that I could use that. I will use it next time I face a problem. Thanks!

 

[kalex]

You can also use system restore before hand to create a restore point. sometimes automated one doesn't work properly. so before you make any major changes, just run it and create a restore point.

 

[Zeos]

Anyone else seeing this?

Installed it as an upgrade on an iMac (Win XP SP2), and it boots at the same speed as the previous 1.x install. Maybe the slowness is only on the laptops?

 

[velum]

Upgrade to Fusion 2 Ok on MBP

Hi!

I upgraded ny MBP (2.4 GHz, 4 Gb RAM) from VMware Fusion 1.1.3 to Fusion 2 last night. It is true that it took quite some time to update the VMware Tools, but every thing went ok. At first, I had the impression that there were more disk I/O than previously. However, it might just have been an impression because I was in a very quiet room and I could here the disk accesses. I left the machine and the VM running all night. I thought that maybe some automated maintenance tasks had to be performed. Things like disk defragmentation; although, I don't know if this works the same on virtual machines, and I don't know how disk fragmentation is managed on OS X.

On the VM, I am running Windows XP Pro SP2. I don't know now much time booting the VM took before the upgrade. It is now taking 3 minutes, which seems a bit longer than before. Retrieving the profile information seems to be taking ages compared to before.

Cheers!

JF

 

[velum]

Unity Mode

... some more input...

I really like the idea of the Unity Mode. Unfortunately, Copy/Paste does not work as well in that mode. And there is always quite a lag when moving/resizing VM windows. Another annoyance is the fact that when I click on an application in the VM taskbar to bring that app to the front, it stows the window instead of bringing it to the front. What else? Oh yeah, the USB 2.0 bug when using more than 2 Gb for the VM hasn't been fixed in 2.0.

JF

 

[dawnraid]

ok I need to downgrade from 2 back to 1.3. Its soooo slow, windows vista with 1 gb of ram on my C2D 2.1ghz macbook takes 4 or 5 minutes to boot compared to about 1.5 minutes before.

 

[n0de]

I have the same issues with Fusion 2.0.

I downloaded the trial of Parallels 3.0 last night and migrated my vm using Transporter, very easy. I did have to re-activate windows and MS Office, but other than that Parallels seems to be a big improvement.

Coherence (like Unity) is much more responsive, OSX seems more stable as the Parallels vm is set to use only 768mb of RAM instead of the 1gb I needed in Fusion. Restore from a suspended vm is about 35 seconds in Parallels vs 1 minute in Fusion. Sharing folders and files seems more seamless too.

Granted I did make the small investment in Fusion, but the $49 Green Software package Parallels is offering is a pretty good deal, even though I have no interest in the other apps it includes.

It seems that the two leapfrog each other every so often, so I will probably keep Fusion installed in case the next version is better.

 

[Supp0rtLinux]

Just a quick comment... in VMWare 2.x (both the betas, RC's and final 2.0 release they added some optimization options. Under VMWare -> Preferences, you can choose to "Optimize for virtual machine disk performance" or "Optimize for Mac OS application performance". By default, in the betas and RC's, the "Enable debugging checks" option is checked as it integrates to their crash reporter tool. You can get quite a bit of performance back by not checking "Enable debugging checks" and putting a bullet in "Optimize for Mac OS application performance".

By default, as well, if you use Fusion to boot your BootCamp copy of XP/Vista, it will choose to emulate two CPUs. A good performance option is to only allow it to have one virtual CPU. This means that of your two cores, only one is used by Fusion/Windows and the other is always available to OS X.

RAM is important as well. My initial Mac had 2Gb and I allocated 512Mb to XP Pro SP3. Later I upgraded to 4Gb and then gave XP 1Gb and it has performed much better.

Interestingly, I've found the network to be an issue too. If I boot up XP and log in to my domain at work, then hibernate XP, then go home and bring XP out of hibernate (but obviously in Fusion), it hangs on the network looking for the domain, my mapped home dir, etc. I've found the catch is to always log out of XP, then hibernate it. When I get home, I fire up Fusion and bring XP out of hibernate, then log in to my local system, not the domain and things are nice and snappy.

 

[Supp0rtLinux]

Yes I did, but it didn't seem to complete (I was still seeing the found new hardware notifications, which should disappear if all device drivers are properly installed). I guess that's where the problem is. Skimming through the VMWare Forums, most of the problems were caused by an incomplete install of VMWare Tools. But I did try uninstalling and re-installing the tools. That hung for ever. When i rebooted the VM and tried installing, it gave the error "An install script is currently running. Please complete that install" or something to that effect.

I was worried I was mucking with my VM (Since this is a boot-camp VM, I do not have the "snapshot" facility) so I gave up and was relieved when everything worked after downgrading to 1.1.3 and re-installing VMWare tools.

FWIW: I did see this problem too. I had upgraded through all the betas and RC's then to the final product. In the end, I didn't downgrade to 1.1.x. Instead, I booted up XP, then uninstalled the VMWare tools, rebooted it again, disabled AV and installed the VMWare tools. One more reboot and all has been fine ever since...

 

[dacreativeguy]

Same problem here. Been looking everywhere to find others with the same issues. Have a MBP 2.4 that ran Win XP SP2 very nicely under Fusion 1.x. I upgraded to 2.0 a few days ago and it is super slow. Upgraded the tools just like I was supposed to. I hope they fix this with an update soon.

 

[VoterComter]

VMWare 2 is nice but soooooo SLOW

Well I can sure verify that VMWare 2 has some degradation compared to 1.1.3.

I had 1.1.3 on my MBP and was indeed a very happy camper. Now 2 came out, i immediately installed looking forward to see whats new. While there are some nice features (library window). The performace is exceptionally slow on certain apps. In general everything seems to work just fine, but , for example source code editing with ms visual studio is *REALLY* slow.

Upon re-installing 1.1.3 everything came back to normal and 'up to speed'.

to saisrujan : Having read your post i waited an exceptional amount of time for the installer script to finish, and eventually, it did !

 

[VoterComter]

VMWare 2 is nice but soooooo SLOW

Well I can sure verify that VMWare 2 has some degradation compared to 1.1.3.

I had 1.1.3 on my MBP and was indeed a very happy camper. Now 2 came out, i immediately installed looking forward to see whats new. While there are some nice features (library window). The performance is exceptionally slow on certain apps. In general everything seems to work just fine, but , for example source code editing with ms visual studio is *REALLY* slow.

Upon re-installing 1.1.3 everything came back to normal and 'up to speed'.

to saisrujan : Having read your post i waited an exceptional amount of time for the installer script to finish, and eventually, it did !

 

[fteter]

Ditto

Fusion 2 on my iMac giving me headaches as well. Never had the good fortune to try out 1.1.3. The 2.0 version runs far too slowly to even get through the VMware Tools install. I've uninstalled it and asked VMware for a refund...we'll see how that goes.

 

[chuckewe]

3d acceleration

Although I'm not running a Macbook Air, I am running a Macbook pro 2.16 with 3 gb.

I'm experiencing the same problems with version 2, running Win XP. My boot up time was taking anywhere from 10 - 15 minutes.

After reading the forum, I followed two of the suggestions I disconnected the network, and changed the optimized settings to Mac OS from virtual machine.

Three things I did was turn off the 3d acceleration,turned off automatic updates, and in the lower right hand corner turned off connect to Genesys logic usb.

Changed start up time from launching VMFusion to Windows XP being loaded, to around 3 minutes. This while I was running Foxfire in 10.4.11.

Hope these suggestions help others

 

[brianwilson71]

Slow! but USB keys performing better

Hi, I upgraded to version 2.0. It was a smooth upgrade from version 1.x but unlike others here I saw a big performance hit.

The reason I upgraded was because I have Truecrypt encrypted USB keys that were getting regularly corruped in the old version. This *seems* to be fixed although its early days yet. If anyone has been able to speed their version 2.0 up please let me know.

Thanks,

/Brian

 

[wbspresslyjr]

Snapshots at upgrade

When you upgrade to vmware fusion 2.0 it does a snapshot of the original (not upgraded) vm. I reverted to that snapshot and everything works fine. I did not do anything else after that point -- it will ask to upgrade the vm -- say no. This might be a tolerable work-around until a definitive answer is found, or vmware releases a patch.

 

[ksmith80209]

I copied my VMWare WinXP image over from my MBP to the new Rev.B Air and it is actually faster on the Air. The SSD seems to really help Fusion's load/shut down times for me. Other than that - it seems to be the same speed (once loaded) on both machines.

 

[brianwilson71]

Sorted!

A couple of posts ago I mentioned that I had suffered a performance hit when upgrading to VMware Fusion 2.0 . Well the issue has been resolved! I did a lot of things so not sure exactly what sorted the problem but the good news is I made a list of them:

- I have 4GB of Ram. Previously I allocated 3GB to Fusion to try and get a better response from Windows. I have now set this back to 2GB macbook, 2GB Windows

- I was using 2 virtual processors. I now use 1.

- DISABLE: the following setting: Settings->Sharing->Allow your macs to open apps in the virtual machine.

- ENABLE: VMware->Optimize for Mac Performance. (Ensure debugging checks are disabled)

- Ensure you have the latest version of VMware tools installed. I already did so no change required here.

One other thing I did which is most likely unrelated but is a very good thing to do is to shrink your VM disk. This gives extra space back to the Macbook.


With all that done both Mac and Windows fly! My issue was the same as everyone elses in that it was fast in version 1.x and upgrading to 2.0 brought it to a standstill. I can now say absolutely that there is nothing wrong with 2.0, it just needed a little tweaking

Regards,

/Brian

 

[tigres]

I copied my VMWare WinXP image over from my MBP to the new Rev.B Air and it is actually faster on the Air. The SSD seems to really help Fusion's load/shut down times for me. Other than that - it seems to be the same speed (once loaded) on both machines.

When I set up my new Air (should it ever arrive) can you please provide the steps for the copy of the VMware image?

I.E. how do I allocate the image (disk) if it is not a fresh install? What exactly gets copied? Do I just use time machine? I do not want to copy all of my MBP content, I only want to bring over my VM portion as it will take me hours to set up from scratch.

Thanks so much for your advice/assistance.