Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Older iMacs and VMWare Fusion -- memory impact?

1

147798

Suspended
Original poster
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back