Should VMWare Fusion run Windows 7/Vista Better than a Netbook?

Should it?
I find it kind of laggy working on office 2007..
its a bit choppy, is anyone experiencing the same problems?
its almost to the point of being usless as it doesnt flow as nice as in bootcamp.

what settings are you using? i allocated 1GB Ram and 1 CPU.

 

It depends what the system you're running it under is, and how much you allocate to it. How laggy?
On my desktop running Vista X64, I can run another Vista X64 machine with no lag at all through VMware. But I'm running an E8400 and 6GB of RAM. Dedicating 3 to the virtual machine, and allowing the virtual machine to utilize both cores.
Also, be sure to install VMware tools. Check device manager in the virtual machine to make sure the VM's video drivers are installed properly (this will come with installing VMware tools).

 

yeah, im running it on the unibody macbook pro
should i allocate two virtual CPU's?

 

Try setting hardware acceleration to full.

right click on desktop -> personalize -> Display setting -> advanced -> troubleshooting

 

its set to full already

 

Allocate more resources to Vista.

 

what kind of resources should i allocate?

i allocated 1024 mb and 1 virtual processor..
should i be allocating more?
i just expected fusion to be more snappy when running office and etc

 

If you are running Vista than 1GB really isn't enough and should actually be the bare minimum. Vista's recommended RAM should really be 2GB. I myself allocate 1GB to my XP Boot Camp virtual machine.

And you shouldn't need to allocate more than 1 cpu to a virtual machine. Unless Windows programs you use specifically can take full advantage of 2 cores, giving the VM 2 cores will actually things down. This is because OS X needs to schedule 2 cores to Fusion and you can imagine finding opportunities where 2 cores are free to to give to Fusion is a lot more difficult than finding 1 core free. This is especially true in notebooks which only have 2 cores. I believe the VMWare support pages recommends leaving a core free for OS X tasks.

You can also disable settings in VMWare Fusion that you don't need, like by default it doesn't connect my DVD drive to the VM. I only enable it when I need it so Fusion doesn't have to maintain the connection. The other setting to consider is under Preferences (cmd + ,), under General, select optimize for virtual machine disk performance. I don't find it impacts OS X much unless the VM is doing so heavy file copying or searching, but does make the VM a bit snappier.

 

I am actually running Windows 7. Since it is supposed to be running on netbooks, i thought it should perform better in fusion.

Another thing, i saw some videos of people playing games in fusion, is it possible? everytime i try to load warcraft, the screen just stays black and loading forever.

so should i still allocate 2gb of ram for windows 7? would this affect the OSX performance?

 

I am not very familiar with Fusion but in VMWare Workstation there is a knob that sets the priority (Normal vs. Real Time). Setting the priority to real-time may increase the performance.


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Windows 7 would probably still prefer 2GB of RAM. I believe Windows 7 is going to make better use of existing hardware, but it isn't going to miraculously have a lot lower system requirements than Vista. If you have 4GB of RAM, then allocating 2GB to a VM shouldn't have a huge effect on OS X itself. Unless you have a ton of other Mac applications running.

The other thing about Windows 7 is that it isn't supported in VMWare Fusion since it's still in beta. Windows 7 uses the same driver model as Vista which is why drivers still work, but they obviously aren't optimized, especially something as complicated and finicky as virtualization drivers to trick the OS into thinking it's running on it's own system.

Personally, I haven't found acceptable gaming performance in VMWare Fusion. I generally find that while the average fps is decent, there are occasional dips the kill the overall experience. This is even with lower resolutions like 800x600 and lower settings. There are also some cases of missing textures as is the case when I tried Vice City. Part of the problem may be my system is getting a bit old now with a 2.16GHz 65nm Merom and a X1600. Results with the latest 45nm Penryns are probably a bit better even at the same clock speeds since they have a bit better hardware virtualization support. A 8600M GT or 9600M GT helps too of course, but flipping through graphics settings having little effect, the bottleneck likely isn't the GPU, but the CPU having to mediate between Windows and OS X and DirectX and OpenGL.

The other thing is that VM performance is usually optimized and marketed for actual virtual machine images. I've been told by VMWare developers that Boot Camp VMs will be slower since it's reading from an actual partition and limited by Apple's storage drivers, whereas a virtual machine image is like any other file and can be cached for fast access.