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

Jacob Allen

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 29, 2011
5
0
When I set up virtual box, it asks how much ram I want to give to the new OS. I know when I'm running the VM, that ram will be unavailable, but does it take up the ram forever, so if I have 4GB of ram, and I give 1GB of ram to the new OS, will OS X only have 3GB left even when the VM is not running?
 

Attachments

  • Screen Shot 2011-09-21 at 7.21.05 PM.png
    Screen Shot 2011-09-21 at 7.21.05 PM.png
    87.4 KB · Views: 187
If you try to give more than half your RAM to the guest OS, it warns you that your host OS may become unstable. I had to do this to run win 8 64 bit inside win 7 32 bit. I had 4 gig of RAM but virtualbox seemed to think I could only give the guest OS 1.5 Gig. I couldn't get through the Win 8 install with less than 2 gig (on windows) so I increased it. I shut down everything but the VM while I was doing the install. After the install I was able to go back and reduce it.

I had a similar situation with win 8 on my Mac. I increased the RAM for the VM to 1.5 Gig to get it to install but I was able to reduce it to only 512MB afterwards. Note that any snapshots I made with the larger RAM were no good anymore.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.