vmware fusion... unity mode

[narreth]

Ok, so i already have a bootcamp partition, and i installed vmware today and i am using it. however, what i want to do is to be able to have microsoft word and excel (the windows versions) on my dock and be able to just click them and then just microsoft word loads in windows but it doesnt show windows itself....

also, it seems to be running a little on the slow side... startup is really sluggish and i know virtualization supposed to be slow but i thought vmware supposed to be faster than parallels? anyway, i have a mbp 13" 2.26ghz and i assigned 1 cpu core and 1.5 gb ram to it (i have 4gb ram total)... is that good enough or is there something else i can do to maximize the speed?

tnx in advance!

 

[ViRGE]

It's been a while since I've used Fusion, but Unity mode should do what you describe.

As for the speed, that sounds normal for running it off of a laptop.

 

[narreth]

It's been a while since I've used Fusion, but Unity mode should do what you describe.

As for the speed, that sounds normal for running it off of a laptop.

EDIT: ok i got the unity mode working how i want it.

but now i noticed that any time i run vmware it takes some of the free space on my bootcamp HDD....
at first it had 15.12 gigs or so free. then i ran vmware once and it went down to 14.97. now i ran vmware again and now i only have 14.84 gb free? it doesnt seem significant but over time i dunno...
why is it taking free space from my hdd like that?

 

[Kmax82]

Also, unless you HAVE to use your Bootcamp partition, I would recommend using a VM created with Fusion/Parallels. It's MUCH quicker than running from a separate partition.

 

[narreth]

Also, unless you HAVE to use your Bootcamp partition, I would recommend using a VM created with Fusion/Parallels. It's MUCH quicker than running from a separate partition.

i can convert the bootcamp partition to a VM and everything will work fine right?

 

[sjwaste]

If you're using FileVault, make sure your Virtual Disk is outside of any FV-encrypted area. Otherwise it's going to be painfully slow. I learned that the hard way.

 

[Kmax82]

i can convert the bootcamp partition to a VM and everything will work fine right?

Umm.. in theory, yes. I haven't ever tested it though.

 

[fatpat268]

When I was running a vm, I did it two ways:

1. Windows 7 Bootcamp Partition imported into VMWare Fusion 3.
2. Stripped down Windows XP SP3 (use nlite) installed in VMWare.

Loading the same programs, the stripped XP was a lot faster than the Win 7 bootcamp in VMware.

Also, the startup will always be a bit slow. The beauty of VMware Fusion though, is that you can pretty much keep the VM running in the background with a pretty small memory footprint, so long as you don't have a lot of processes running in the background of your windows install.

 

[Kmax82]

Also, the startup will always be a bit slow. The beauty of VMware Fusion though, is that you can pretty much keep the VM running in the background with a pretty small memory footprint, so long as you don't have a lot of processes running in the background of your windows install.

They've also sped up Suspend mode by A LOT.. so if you need the RAM, just hit Suspend, and when you need to go back into Windows it will load almost instantly.