I'm starting to doubt why I bought VMWare Fusion...

[TSE]

Okay, so I bought VMWare Fusion. I installed it, and ran it. I have a MacBook Pro with 2 GBs of RAM. I bought it expecting not excellent performance, but pretty good performance. I used my Windows Vista Home Premium boot camp partition. I took off all the Aero and graphical UI stuff. I allocated 1 GB of RAM to it, and both processor cores are on. It runs like absolute ****. The mouse isn't even smooth. Even with no other programs open besides VMWare, it runs horrible.

Not only that, but now it says due to a hardware change, I need to reregister my copy of Vista! How the hell do I do that?

 

[KingYaba]

Did you install the "Vmware Tools" in Vista?

 

[krackers]

I'm starting to doubt why I did not TRY VMWare Fusion before i bought it.

did you install vmware tools like the poster above me said.Did you try the trial version before buying it, so you can test it.
Also, if this does not work try parralels 4. There is a trial so you can test it.
If it works you can return vmware if you can and get parralels. Also, if you just want to run windows and dont need virtualization, you can use boot camp.

 

[mattyb240]

I run xp in VMWare using 3d software and hove no issues? So its either Vista or ...actually its probably vista

 

[nick9191]

Try XP or the beta of Windows 7. Vista is not advisable in VMWare/Parallels unless you have 3/4gb of RAM and so can allocate 2gb to Vista.

 

[TSE]

Why does it say I need to register Windows then? I bought a full legal copy of Windows Vista Home Premium in the spring and it has been working just fine in Boot Camp.

Is it just VMWare Fusion?

 

[Keleko]

You need to register Windows any time you make significant hardware changes (such as installing it to a VMWare virtual machine). Also you need to install the VMWare tools to make Window behave better in the VM.

 

[kuwisdelu]

Why does it say I need to register Windows then? I bought a full legal copy of Windows Vista Home Premium in the spring and it has been working just fine in Boot Camp.

Is it just VMWare Fusion?

You're using Fusion to access the Bootcamp install of Vista, correct?

Asking to be reactivated is a known glitch with accessing the Bootcamp install through Fusion, but I believe it's been corrected in the newer versions. Upgrade your version of Fusion to the newest and see if that helps. Alternatively, it should be documented on the VMWare website with a fix.


I ran XP through Fusion with 2GB of RAM. Couldn't run a whole lot at once, but it was certainly working a whole lot better than what you're experiencing. I don't like automatically blaming it on Vista, but XP worked well enough for me, so it's certainly possible.

 

[plinden]

Half your Mac's RAM is too much to assign to Vista. I haven't used my Vista VM much (I've only booted into it to install updates ... I also have an XP VM that I only use for Visio diagrams), but it's acceptable with 512MB out of 2GB total RAM.

My acceptable may not be the same as your acceptable but at least the mouse movement is smooth.

Anyway, if you plot "acceptable performance" on the y axis against assigned RAM on the x axis, there would be a peak between 1/4 - 1/3 the host RAM.

 

[philosopherdog]

I was actually curious whether VMware affects performance just installing it without running Windows virtually. I had Parallels installed and it definitely slowed down my boot times. It was also running, among other things, all of these extra network devices, etc. even though I hadn't even installed XP yet. Does VMware do this as well? Personally, I would stay clear of Vista anything. Maybe grab a copy of XP from ebay or something.

 

[jackiecanev2]

Activating in boot camp, switching to fusion, installing VMWare tools, then re-activating in VMWare should keep you from having to re-activate due to "hardware changes".

 

[drichards]

This is why I use Parallels. No hassles.

 

[justflie]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Vista run natively doesn't run well with 1GB RAM. Why would you expect a virtual machine to run it better?

 

[geerlingguy]

I have had Vista, XP and Windows 7 running simultaneously on my iMac with 4 GB of RAM - 1 GB for Vista, 1 GB for 7, and 512 MB for XP, and they ran fine (just doing web testing).

Vista definitely should be running better, but, like others in the post suggest, I would stick with XP.

I've used both Parallels and Fusion since their first releases, and have found Fusion to almost always be the faster of the two; however, Parallels usually supports 3rd party peripherals, USB devices, drives, etc a little better.

 

[bored911]

well...

 

[kalex]

Make sure you have vmware tools installed. also like others have said Vista is not really good OS to virtualize. try either Windows 7 or XP.

I have no issues with Fusion and it runs pretty stable for me.

make sure you are running latest build as it has lot of fixes. Also when you are not running any vms there is minimal foot print from fusion.

I usually run 5-6 vms at a time for my vmware lab that i'm learning on.