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mpaquette

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 15, 2010
136
65
Columbia, SC
Looking for feedback from anyone that uses VMWare Fusion on their MacBook Air. Does it perform well when running Windows 7 in a VM? I was concerned about running out of memory with only 4GB, but then figured that any paging done to the SSD would be much faster vs. a spindle drive. So in reality, a VM may perform better on an Air with 4GB of RAM vs. a MBP with 4GB of RAM and a spindle drive. Just looking for some real world results.
 
On my MBA, I use fusion with Windows XP so I only need to use a VM with 1GB of RAM (or less). I never notice any slow down. On my MBP, I use Windows 7, but I can a lot 2GB easily (probably 3 if I really wanted to), since it has 8GB of RAM. You could probably get away with a 2GB VM for Windows 7 on the MBA if you wanted to, but since I only use Windows for a handful of programs, windows XP works just fine for me.

However, you are right, due to the SSD the impact of Paging is reduced. I still wish the MBA had an option for 8GB of RAM though.
 
Thank you for the info. I only use XP in Fusion as well at this point. I use it to run some old terminal emulation stuff for work. And for that, XP seems to work the best. I just figured at some point in the next year or 2, I'd have to start using Windows 7.
 
I use vmWare fusion with both Win 7 and Linux virtual machines. The Win 7 vm works fine with 1GB of RAM assigned to it for the tasks that I use that vm for. I have some software that is Win Specific that I need to run on occasion. I don't think that it would work very well if the software you need to run is very RAM intensive though.

The only time I have an issue with performance is if I have multiple virtual machines open at the same time...

Regards

Kevin
 
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