VMWare really slow

[Goi]

Hi,

I'm tinkering around with VMWare Workstation 6 on my XP machine, and trying to load Vista virtually on it. VMWare is set to reserve 1.5GB of memory for Vista. The system is a P4 2.93GHz with 2.5GB of memory. Not the fastest machine, but I thought it would at least be usable. However it seems to be crawling at times, especially the host machine. I keep hearing the HDD trashing even though Task Manager shows there's still plenty of physical memory left.

Is there any setting to make it make full use of the memory/make it faster?

Thanks.

 

[classy]

What kind of hard drive is it on?

 

[MegaVovaN]

There is a setting in VMware itself (not settings for particular VM) that ask how much RAM to allocate to ALL VMs and whether to fit whole VM in the ram. Set that to yes.

Like, all of VM's RAM will be stored in physical RAM.


Also, since you have fresh install of Vista, it's probably indexing the virtual disk, or something like that, hence the thrashing of real disk (since VHD is on real HDD, not in RAM).

 

[Goi]

classy, it's a pretty old 80GB SATA HDD.

MegaNovaN, which setting is this? The only relevant memory settings I see are:

Edit->Preferences->Memory->Reserved memory (set to 2296MB currently)
VM->Settings->Hardware->Memory(set to 1.5GB currently)

And how do I disable Vista indexing then?

 

[Nothinman]

I've always thought VMware on XP was slower than on Linux because of excessive disk I/O. You should probably startup perfmon and see if the I/O is from XP paging or just VMware doing it's own thing. That would at least point you in the right direction.

 

[MegaVovaN]

classy, it's a pretty old 80GB SATA HDD.

MegaNovaN, which setting is this? The only relevant memory settings I see are:

Edit->Preferences->Memory->Reserved memory (set to 2296MB currently)
VM->Settings->Hardware->Memory(set to 1.5GB currently)

And how do I disable Vista indexing then?

Disabling indexing:
http://www.tweakvista.com/articles/39118/tweak-indexing-options-for-more-performance/

Relevant setting is first one you listed:
Edit->Preferences->Memory->Reserved memory

Set it to look like mine, except change the value to 1500 mb. Make sure you set the dot to "Fit all virtual machine memory into host reserved RAM."
http://i47.tinypic.com/35hlco5.jpg


With current setting of 2.3 GB I think your host os (XP) is choking for RAM and pages the HDD. Precise answer to this? Do what Nothinman suggests in post right above mine.