MacBook Pro 15" needs 8 GB to run VM Fusion?

[Mork]

I find that when I'm running an instance of VM Fusion (versions 2 and 3, same experience) along with whatever other apps that were running on the Mac side, I'm using almost all of my 4 GB installed memory.

Some memory is marked as "inactive", but the machine gets extremely slow!

My question is, would upping the memory to 8 GB make the difference and do people really need 8 GB in virtual machine hosting cases?

If I try to run a _second_ virtual machine (two win xp pro instances), there's so much paging going on that the machine becomes almost totally unresponsive for minutes at a time.

I've run Disk tools, but no problems seem to exist on the disk. And with no VMs running, the machine is fine.

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I found a $499 memory upgrade (2 4 GB chips) on newegg:

Mushkin Enhanced 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 1066 (PC3 8500) Dual Channel Kit Memory for Apple Model 976644A

but I have no experience with this vendor (Mushikn).

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Look forward to any and all replies.

Thanks.

- M

 

[Eidorian]

How fast is your hard drive?

 

[Mork]

How fast is your hard drive?

It's the standard 320 GB / 5400 RPMS

Although this drive failed in the first year I owned the MBP, I was told that the 7200s are even more unreliable.

Would a faster drive be the ticket or must more memory, or, gulp, both?

Thanks.

- M

 

[MBHockey]

I'd say your HD is as big a bottleneck as ram. I have 4GB of ram and when i went from a 7200 RPM drive to an SSD all of the slowness associated with Parallels, or really anything, just disappeared.

 

[Eidorian]

Drive access speeds and times cause slowdowns in virtual machines. I'd get a faster hard drive first.

 

[HellDiverUK]

Mushkin have been in the memory business a very long time, and their memory is top of the line. Don't worry about the quality, I rate them well above Crucial and Kingston.

 

[Mork]

Mushkin have been in the memory business a very long time, and their memory is top of the line. Don't worry about the quality, I rate them well above Crucial and Kingston.

Sounds good, thanks.

 

[Mork]

Drive access speeds and times cause slowdowns in virtual machines. I'd get a faster hard drive first.

Even though the Mac says I've used 3.99 GB?

Maybe "both" (memory and faster drive) are needed.

-- M

 

[Mork]

I'd say your HD is as big a bottleneck as ram. I have 4GB of ram and when i went from a 7200 RPM drive to an SSD all of the slowness associated with Parallels, or really anything, just disappeared.

Maybe upgrading to a 500 GB 7200 RPM is in order.

Thanks!

-- M