VMWare Fusion 3 Laggy on MacBook

[lilfleck]

Hey,

I have a MacBook (aluminum unibody); I recently installed VMWare fusion 3 and put a copy of Windows 7 on there. Set it to utilize one core at first, but that was painfully slow, so I let it use two cores with 1.3mb of RAM. Still laggy. It was bad enough for me to not want to use anymore and uninstall... Has anyone else experienced problems with VMWare?

Not sure if it's my hardware or the software causing the lag.

Thanks.

 

[chrfr]

Hey,

I have a MacBook (aluminum unibody); I recently installed VMWare fusion 3 and put a copy of Windows 7 on there. Set it to utilize one core at first, but that was painfully slow, so I let it use two cores with 1.3mb of RAM. Still laggy. It was bad enough for me to not want to use anymore and uninstall... Has anyone else experienced problems with VMWare?

Not sure if it's my hardware or the software causing the lag.

Thanks.

How much RAM do you have? Setting VMWare to use both cores in a 2 core machine will not help performance and may likely make it slower. I would bet you need more RAM in the computer if you don't have at least 4GB.

 

[lilfleck]

How much RAM do you have? Setting VMWare to use both cores in a 2 core machine will not help performance and may likely make it slower. I would bet you need more RAM in the computer if you don't have at least 4GB.

I only have 2gb... what kind of RAM does this laptop take? DDR2? Can I buy it from newegg.com?

EDIT: Apple salesman lied to me! I asked him from before buying it if I needed more RAM, and he said "unlike a PC, 2GB of RAM is more than what you need, you can have 50 applications running and it wont be slow!" I should have known better; he saw a sucker Mac newbie.

 

[prostuff1]

I only have 2gb... what kind of RAM does this laptop take? DDR2? Can I buy it from newegg.com?

EDIT: Apple salesman lied to me! I asked him from before buying it if I needed more RAM, and he said "unlike a PC, 2GB of RAM is more than what you need, you can have 50 applications running and it wont be slow!" I should have known better; he saw a sucker Mac newbie.

This is mostly true. My sisters runs with 2GB of RAM is more than happy. You are trying to run an application that runs another OS inside it. Would you true to run Windows 7 native on 1GB of RAM? I would think not. I am still on Fusion 2 and am running a windows XP Pro and a Windows 7 VM in it. I don't run them at the same time but i dedicate 1 CPU and 2GB of RAM to each when they run. I have an older MBP but have upped the RAM to 4GB and it makes a HUGE difference when running Fusion. You may also have Aero on and that could be causing a lot of slowdown since you are running this on a MB with integrated graphics and not a MBP with dedicated graphics.

 

[dyn]

There seems to be some confusion to what the cpu setting in the vm settings in Fusion actually does. You can't tell Fusion what core to use, it just uses the cpu. You can set virtual cores for the vm. This means it will virtualise a 1, 2 or 4 core cpu in the vm. This is useful for testing multicore appliances. Other than that it makes things slower so it is not recommended to use.

 

[chrono1081]

For most people 2GB is plenty in Mac OS but...like the other poster stated virtualization software is completely different. For virtual machines you will definitely need more ram. I run vm's on 4GB of ram and that runs good. I usually only have one, sometimes two at a time running.

 

[lilfleck]

ok cool, so it seems that I need more RAM. Can I buy this at Newegg? Can someone please post a link to the correct type?

 

[dyn]

Memory and the hard drive are the two components that mostly affect the vm's performance. I upgrade my memory to 4 GB (but I would have liked 8 GB in total, I might do that eventually) and swapped the hdd for a ssd. The biggest speed increase came from the ssd as it enabled me to run several vm's at the same time a lot more smoothly without having an affect on OS X itself. It may have been an expensive upgrade but to me it was well worth it. The cpu doesn't bring much changes, I can't honestly tell if I'm using the 2.4 GHz cpu in my mbp or the 2.0 GHz one in the Mac mini.

If you want to buy more memory than check out the system specifications from your Mac (it's on the box as well as in system profiler). There are some companies that have this configurator on their website so you only need to know what Mac you have. I think OWC has something like that.

 

[maflynn]

The apple rep really didn't "lie" to you, but rather not knowing all of the facts.

Generally speaking 2gig should be ok for many people who just surf the web, do business apps and such. Throw VMware and window's 7 into the mix and you'll be much better off with 4gig.

 

[fishmoose]

Not sure what to think here, I was running Fusion 3 on a 2 gig machine giving fusion 1 gig and at first 1 core was enabled, with that it lagged as hell it was not usable, I was preparing to re-install XP again instead of Windows 7. Then I switched to 2 cores and now it runs pretty good.

And I'm running on an older MacBook then the OP. I could do with an iMac 27" 8 gig ram and an i7 though

 

[lilfleck]

Not sure what to think here, I was running Fusion 3 on a 2 gig machine giving fusion 1 gig and at first 1 core was enabled, with that it lagged as hell it was not usable, I was preparing to re-install XP again instead of Windows 7. Then I switched to 2 cores and now it runs pretty good.

And I'm running on an older MacBook then the OP. I could do with an iMac 27" 8 gig ram and an i7 though

I switched to two core support, but it still took forever to start up and run it normally. It 'worked' but was not fluid in its functionality.

 

[fishmoose]

Do you have the 64 bit or 32 bit version? I have the 32 bit version.

 

[dyn]

I switched to two core support, but it still took forever to start up and run it normally. It 'worked' but was not fluid in its functionality.

That is expected behaviour as stated in the help function. If you open the vm settings and go to processors & ram you can click the ?-button. You'll see the following definition for the virtual processors:

You can set the number of virtual processors available to the virtual machine.

Best Practice: For Windows virtual machines running mostly Office and Internet productivity applications, there is little benefit to using multiple virtual processors, so the default single virtual processor is ideal. The best practice when using multiple virtual processors in a virtual machine is that multiple virtual processors should be used when the number of physical processor cores exceeds the desired number of virtual processors. For example, do not use two virtual processors unless you have a quad core physical processor.

Which means if you have a dual core cpu you should only use 1 virtual processor. If you have a quad core you can use 2 virtual processors. If you have the octocore Mac Pro you can assign the max of 4 virtual processors to a vm. You can assign more if you want but as you have noticed it will have a very negative effect on the performance of the vm.

Did you do an upgrade of Fusion 2.x to 3.0? If so did you uninstall and then reinstall the VMware Tools? Did you enable Aero by redoing the Windows Experience Index and choosing an Aero theme?

 

[lilfleck]

This is my first install of VMWare Fusion. I don't think Aero was enabled though. I didn't turn it on, but since it was running so slow, I'm pretty sure Win7 would have auto turned it off; as it does a benchmark before loading the desktop for the first time to see what your computer is capable of.

 

[dyn]

Yep, that's correct. You need to run the Windows Experience Index (which is the benchmark you're talking about). After you've done that you still need to enable it by selecting one of the Aero themes.

 

[lilfleck]

Yep, that's correct. You need to run the Windows Experience Index (which is the benchmark you're talking about). After you've done that you still need to enable it by selecting one of the Aero themes.

Well, I'm not going to be enabling it considering it runs laggy without it... Until I get more RAM.