VMware Fusion - Any Good?

Hi,
I'm thinking about getting the VMware Fusion to run windows on my mac today, but just wanted to know does anyone have/had it on their laptop and was it indeed any good? I tried searching on the website for it but can't find it to see how much it is in UK Pounds only in USA dollars.
Thanks

Just to add my two cents as it were, I've been using VMWare Fusion for at least a year now and the only problems that I've had is it not running some of my more graphics heavy games.
For using Office and Messenger though it work perfectly. There's no slowdown when using it. You can create a virtual machine for pretty much any OS as long as you have the install files.
Also, if you have a Boot Camp partition you can load that up as a virtual machine so you don't have to install a separate one. Although, I have a Boot Camp partition set up and I've also got a VM of the same Windows that is only running Office and a few other programs so that I can easily check compatibility.
THe other thing you can do with the virtual machines (not the Boot Camp machine) is suspend the operation of it, which essentially puts the VM into sleep mode, but you can then close down Fusion or even you Mac. When you load up Fusion again, there's no need to wait for Windows to boot up, just click resume and it's there just as you left it.
I've tried Parallels before but to me it just didn't feel as polished or easy to use as Fusion.
Thats just my opinion though.
Hope this helps
Chris

Similar Messages

  • Unable to launch VMware Fusion.

    I used to using VMware with Bootcamp, but I deleted VMware and now use only Bootcamp. I've been encountering an issue on mac.
    Every time I click on a website link, say in an e-mail, I get a message:
    “Firefox-Boot Camp partition.
    VMware Fusion failed to launch.
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    Thanks,

    Please post Fusion related questions on the Fusion forums as Apple discussions only provide support for Apple products:
    http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/desktop/fusion

  • VMWare Fusion and Windows (any version)

    Hey everyone, first of all I'm new to Macs so please don't flame me.
    I recently bought VMWare Fusion 2.0 for my Macbook so that I can run my Windows XP Home Edition virtually from my BootCamp Partition without having to reboot in order to switch back and forth between the 2 operating systems.
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    Consult the Fusion user guide, or post questions regarding Fusion on VMWare's own forums for Fusion:
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  • I just planned to install windows 7 on my MBP Mid-2012 using VMware Fusion,so i am bit panic about viruses and malware's affecting through vmware,is there any way to avoid from this??

    i just planned to install windows 7 on my MBP Mid-2012 using VMware Fusion,so i am bit panic about viruses and malware's affecting through vmware,is there any way to avoid from this??

    usamasheikh wrote:
    virus protection in vmware or on my running OS X 10.8.2??plz help me out
    First, you can install Microsoft's Security Essentials in the Win 7 VM and keep it up-to-date. Second, you can turn off Sharing in Fusion's System Settings to keep the VM environment separate from your Mac. Third, you can look into Sophos Anti-Virus http://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/sophos-antivirus-for-mac-home-ed ition/download.aspx for the Mac host.

  • VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop Benchmark Comparison

    This is a quickie benchmark of VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop using Super PI, PC Mark 05, and Passmark.
    VMWare Fusion 36932
    Parallels Desktop 3094 Beta 2
    Notes:
    Both virtual machines were allocated with large 10+ GB virtual disks and 640MB of RAM. The VMWare CPU was configured with two processors. The Parallels CPU was configured with 1 (two is not available). VMWare reported the CPU as 1 physical, 2 logical processors running at 2.66 GHz while Parallels reported 1 physical, 1 logical processor running at 9.6 GHz (the combined speed of all four cores on the Mac Pro). The max observed CPU utilization in activity monitor when running under VMWare was 200% and max under Parallels was 173%.
    I chose not to compare 1 VMWare CPU vs. 1 Parallels CPU. While Parallels does not support SMP or multithreaded processes on multiple processors the CPU utilization on the Mac went well above 1 core (173%). For this comparison, I wanted to see results of max processing based on what the two vendors have delivered, as opposed to benchmarking the underlying "virtual or hypervisor cpu" on a 1:1 basis. This explains why VMWare was 2x faster than Parallels on some CPU tests.
    Both of these products are beta. VMWare is running in debug mode (can not be turned off in this beta).
    Caveat emptor on these stats. This was an unscientific exercise to satisfy my curiosity. Some of the extraordinary differences are highlighted with <--.
    Platform:
    Mac Pro 2.66 GHz, 2GB RAM, Nvidia 7300GT
    Disk 1 - OS X, 73GB Raptor
    Disk 2 - dedicated disk where each virtual machine image was created separate from the OS or any OS-related virtual memory files.
    VMWare and Parallels guest OS: Windows XP Professional, SP 2
    Comparison Benchmrk
    VMWare Fusion 36932 and Parallels Desktop 3094 Beta 2
    Super PI Parallels VMWare
    512K 8s 9s
    1M 20s 21s
    4M 1m 57s 2m 03s
    PC Mark 05 Parallels VMWare
    CPU Test Suite N/A N/A
    Memory Test Suite N/A N/A
    Graphics Test Suite N/A N/A
    HDD Test Suite N/A N/A
    HDD - XP Startup 5.0 MB/s 19.54 MB/s <--
    Physics and 3D Test failed Test failed
    Transparent Windows Test failed 69.99 Windows/s
    3D - Pixel Shader Test failed Test failed
    Web Page Rendering 3.58 Pages/s 2.34 Pages/s
    File Decrypt 71.73 MB/s 67.05 MB/s
    Graphics Memory - 64 Lines 179.92 FPS 111.73 FPS
    HDD - General Usage 4.82 MB/s 42.01 MB/s <--
    Multithread Test 1 / Audio Comp N/A N/A
    Multithread Test 1 / Video Encoding Test failed Test failed
    Multithread Test 2 / Text Edit 152.85 Pages/s 138.48 Pages/s
    Multithread Test 2 / Image DeComp 5.91 MPixels/s 35.4 MPixels/s <--
    Multithread Test 3 / File Comp 3.22 MB/s 6.03 MB/s
    Multithread Test 3 / File Encrypt 19.0 MB/s 33.26 MB/s <--
    Multithread Test 3 / HDD - Virus Scan 27.91 MB/s 25.49 MB/s
    Multithread Test 3 / Mem Lat - Rnd 16MB 5.34 MAcc/s 6.63 MAcc/s
    File Comp N/A N/A
    File DeComp N/A N/A
    File Encrypt N/A N/A
    File Decrypt N/A N/A
    Image DeComp N/A N/A
    Audio Comp N/A N/A
    Multithread Test 1 / File Comp N/A N/A
    Multithread Test 1 / File Encrypt N/A N/A
    Multithread Test 2 / File DeComp N/A N/A
    Multithread Test 2 / File Decrypt N/A N/A
    Multithread Test 2 / Audio DeComp N/A N/A
    Multithread Test 2 / Image DeComp N/A N/A
    Memory Read - 16 MB N/A N/A
    Memory Read - 8 MB N/A N/A
    Memory Read - 192 kB N/A N/A
    Memory Read - 4 kB N/A N/A
    Memory Write - 16 MB N/A N/A
    Memory Write - 8 MB N/A N/A
    Memory Write - 192 kB N/A N/A
    Memory Write - 4 kB N/A N/A
    Memory Copy - 16 MB N/A N/A
    Memory Copy - 8 MB N/A N/A
    Memory Copy - 192 kB N/A N/A
    Memory Copy - 4 kB N/A N/A
    Memory Lat - Rnd 16 MB N/A N/A
    Memory Lat - Rnd 8 MB N/A N/A
    Memory Lat - Rnd 192 kB N/A N/A
    Memory Lat - Rnd 4 kB N/A N/A
    Transparent Windows N/A N/A
    Graphics Memory - 64 Lines N/A N/A
    Graphics Memory - 128 Lines N/A N/A
    WMV Video Playback N/A N/A
    3D - Fill Rate Multi Texturing N/A N/A
    3D - Polygon Throughput Multiple Lights N/A N/A
    3D - Pixel Shader N/A N/A
    3D - Vertex Shader N/A N/A
    HDD - XP Startup N/A N/A
    HDD - Application Loading N/A N/A
    HDD - General Usage N/A N/A
    HDD - Virus Scan N/A N/A
    HDD - File Write N/A N/A
    Processor Intel Core 2 9653 MHz Processor Unknown 2661 MHz
    Physical / Logical CPUs "1 Physical, 1 Logical" "1 Physical, 2 Logical"
    MultiCore 1 Processor Core Multicore 2 Processor Cores
    HyperThreading N/A N/A
    Graphics Card Generic VGA Generic VGA
    Graphics Driver Parallels Video Driver VMWare SVGA II
    Co-operative adapters No No
    DirectX Version 9.0c 9.0c
    System Memory 640 MB 640MB
    Motherboard Manufacturer N/A Intel Corporation
    Motherboard Model N/A 440BX Desktop Reference Platform
    Operating System Microsoft Windows XP Microsoft Windows XP
    Passmark Parallels VMWare
    CPU - Integer Math (MOPS) 112.35 230.31 <--
    CPU - Floating Point Math (MOPS) 280.46 588.33 <--
    CPU - Find Prime Numbers (OPS) 446.37 676.99 <--
    CPU - SSE/3DNow! (MMPS) 2118.56 4737.13 <--
    CPU - Comp (KB/s) 2994.16 5952.34 <--
    CPU - Encrypt (MB/s) 18.09 36.27 <--
    CPU - Image Rotation (IRPS) 598.21 1184.41 <--
    CPU - String Sorting (TPS) 2118.81 3672.59 <--
    Graphics 2D - Lines (TPS) 220.71 25.15 <--
    Graphics 2D - Rectangles (TPS) 189.74 61.8 <--
    Graphics 2D - Shapes (TPS) 39.54 13.71 <--
    Graphics 2D - Fonts and Text (OPS) 190.39 75.88 <--
    Graphics 2D - GUI (OPS) 439.77 63.72 <--
    Memory - Allocate Small Block (MB/s) 2533.83 2526.21
    Memory - Read Cached (MB/s) 1960.5 1906.27
    Memory - Read Uncached (MB/s) 1871.79 1826.08
    Memory - Write (MB/s) 1687.81 1545.43
    Memory - Large RAM (OPS) 60.99 46.37
    Disk - Sequential Read (MB/s) 102.11 76.45 <--
    Disk - Sequential Write (MB/s) 58.33 50.9
    Disk - Rnd Seek + RW (MB/s) 51.4 40.4
    CPU Mark 711.08 1432.72 <--
    2D Graphics Mark 743.31 176.5 <--
    Memory Mark 599.94 580.38
    Disk Mark 766.11 606.7
    PassMark Rating 557.27 637.35<br>

    Thanks for posting these numbers - it's an interesting comparison.
    I would expect the final VMWare fusion performance numbers to be quite a bit better than that of Parallels - they have almost a decade's worth of experience more than the Parallels folks in this arena, and a much larger development team to boot.
    Once VMWare Fusion is released to the public, I think that you'll see a clearer distinction between the two products. VMWare will continue to appeal to the professional customer, with a more robust feature set and corporate-friendly features (and a correspondingly higher price tag); Parallels will fall more into the consumer/VirtualPC-replacement market. It will be interesting to see how Parallels will be affected when (and if) VMWare player is ported to OS X.
    Interesting about the Parallels performance stats on a native partition - looks like almost enough reason to avoid the bootcamp partition approach altogether. Sharing a native windows installation with a VM in parallels is a pretty scary situation in any case, as the two environments have entirely different hardware configurations. Do-able, but there is some black magic involved (if you want to see an example of what I mean, try to move a windows installation from one machine to another w/different hardware sometime - it ain't pretty); I wouldn't try this in a production scheme unless I had REALLY good backups.

  • Using Pro/E on a Mac using VMWare Fusion or BootCamp

    Hi
    I have a MacBook Pro:
    Processor:2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
    Memory: 4 GB 1067 Mhz DDR3
    And recently for uni I have had to find a way to get Pro Engineer, a CAD program, running on my Mac. My solution was to buy VMWare Fusion and instal Windows 7 on my Mac so I could then run the CAD program. Once I got that done windows was running well however once I got Pro Engineer installed it was incredibly slow and pretty much unusable.
    My question is has anyone got any experience with running this program on a similar machine and can help me solve this problem so I can run the program? Should I use bootcamp instead of VMWare? Would it make a difference?
    Thanks

    Yes, I would definitely recommend setting up BootCamp for this - it's relatively painless. (It can create a new partition in the unused space on your OS X disk without erasing the disk.) The BootCamp Assistant has detailed instructions on how to go about setting up a partition and installing Windows on it, but the gist of it is that you have the BootCamp Assistant create a partition for you, then you boot from your Windows install disc and install Windows on that partition. When you've booted into Windows for the first time, pop in your OS 10.6 install disc, and it will install Apple's hardware drivers and utilities for Windows. If you got 10.6 shortly after it came out, the drivers will be version 3.0 for Windows Vista - you'll need to download version BootCamp 3.1 from the Apple support site to ensure full support for Windows 7. (If you have a newer copy of 10.6, it might have the new drivers already - I don't know, as I have an older one.)
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  • Display Questions with Retina and VMware Fusion (Windows 7/8)

    Looking to buy my first MacBook Pro and looking to make sure I get the specs I need and have a couple of questions.
    I would like to be able to run (simultaenously)
    During the day for work:
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    Windows 8.1 x64 - 60GB HD - 2 Cores - 4GB+ Ram - Purpose: Office 2013 installed on this VM and all my other work applicatons (light weight)
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    After work:
    Guess it doesn't matter really - i'd like to play games (bootcamp fine) if possible too. Nothing crazy so barely worth mentioning.
    My main questions:
    Display: Iris Pro or nVidia - Can the base 15 inch GPU/CPU handle the two VMs at the same time plus the host OS (OSX) without hiccups?
    Display: How does VMware Fusion recognize the discrete GPU - will the system be smooth/quiet without activating it?
    Battery life: Virtualization is pretty heavy battery wise. Does anyone know what happens to the battery when you're running a couple VMs?
    Display: How is running Windows 7/8 on a MacBook with a specifically retina display? Do the Windows PCs look really ugly/blurry due to such a high resolution?
    What is the minimum hardware required for these VMs to run fast and responsive? (CPU/GPU/RAM only)
    Thanks!!

    Sorry - we're users here, just like you, and some questions just get lost sometimes.
    The fastest hardware you can buy, the easier you'll be able to run Windows. If you use Boot Camp to run Windows (7, 8 or 8.1) the machine will run at it's best. If you want to run Windows alongside the Mac OS, you'll need to use a VM application (I use Parallels - I've tried VMwareFusion but like Parallels better and it just works best for me).
    So, to your questions:
    The Retina machine with the NVIDIA GPU will be the fastest - it's a faster processor and has more VRAM.
    Any VM is going to use resources - how much RAM, for example, is up to you. I have 16 GB of RAM and 8GB dedicated to Parallels/Windows 7 Pro.
    I wouldn't (and you really can't) run a VM for very long on battery. If you're using VM's, that's the time to plug into mains. Running a 'couple' of VM would put further heavy use on your GPU, CPU and shorten your battery life.
    I would make sure to get a good, fast quad-core i7 processor, the 2GB of VRAM NVIDIA GPU and the maximum amount of RAM (16GB).
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    Clinton

  • 10.6.4 complete system freeze when resuming from screensaver-VMWare Fusion

    I have a Macbook Pro, 3,1. I just upgraded to 10.6.4 and noticed the following symptoms:
    Shortly after launching VMWare Fusion 3.1 running a Windows XP VM (from a Bootcamp partition), a series of pop up messages were complaining about a bad OpenGL driver. The message popped up repeatedly and wouldn't let me out, even though I kept pressing "Ok". I had to force quit Fusion, which caused a chkdsk on relaunch of the XP VM.
    After a complete reboot, I started VMWare again. The Fusion complaints haven't shown up again, but when resuming from the screensaver, the system either completely freezes up, or the screen login window starts to flash rapidly and seize up. I'm running Spaces with 6 virtual screens. Whether I'm in the Fusion Spaces screen or any other Spaces screen, the system freaks out when resuming from a screensaver.
    I use this system at work, so I have to be able to lock my screen when I leave my cube. The only way I've been able to ensure the system doesn't freeze up and cause a hard reset of the XP VM is to completely disable the screensaver and power saver features, such as Start Screen Saver = Never, Computer Sleep = Never, Display Sleep = Never and launch the login window by clicking on my user name in the upper right corner of the screen on the menu bar. Even that causes a sluggish screen and I'm not confident it will keep working. I also made sure (from day one) that the Windows XP screensaver functions were all completely disabled. I prefer to use the OS X screensaver for everything, if for no other reason than having a single screen locking/unlocking point for when I step away.
    This was all working properly in 10.6.3. The only nit-nat I noticed about Fusion in 10.6.3 was that it had to be launched in the "Primary Window", which seems to be the upper leftmost Spaces desktop. If I ever moved it to, or started in any other Spaces desktop, it would also exhibit the same random lockups. Keeping it in the "primary" space seems to have stopped the lockups.
    I noticed that there seemed to be significant updates to the OpenGL drivers in 10.6.4. I am experiencing an unfortunate side effect of these updates and hope I'm not alone and that a fix is coming soon. Looking at the other posts, there seem to be a lot of similar problems. I wanted to describe my configuration in case the Apple dev team reads these posts. Thanks.

    I ended up doing an erase and fresh install of Snow Leopard (10.6.0), upgraded to 10.6.4 with the combo update, then a fresh install of all my apps, including VMware 3.1. Everything has been solid for 2 days now. I'm guessing that my system had a magic combination of issues that weren't visible in 10.6.3 but became obvious only after upgrading to 10.6.4. I had been upgrading my OS since 10.5.0 over the last 2 years and needed to do a clean re-install for some time now.
    I'm guessing that others who are noticing problems with the 10.6.4 update have a similar situation with their installations. Think back on all the times a software installation failed, or the system required a hard boot. Plus, I had a lot of 3rd party apps on my box that never posted updates for later Snow Leopard releases, so who knows? Anyway, it's good to have a clean and snappy system again. A lot of my apps launch a lot faster now and survive the screen saver and power saver modes just fine.
    Message was edited by: mausoleum

  • Parallel Desktop vs VMware Fusion

    Hi Guys,
    I do not know if this is the right forum to post this in, but I cant find any forum about this topic. I post it in this forum because I use this forum most. Parallel Desktop or VMware Fusion, which is better. And I was wonder if I bought either of them, do they have the other OS' disc inside or I had to buy one. And how many people the software is licensed to? My school is encouraging me to buy Parallel Desktop.
    Any replies is appreciated
    Regards
    Kwok-Ho Wan
    9 April 2008

    1. Nope wrong forum, try here for Tiger http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=160
    2. Neither Parallels or VMware include an OS, and if you need the latest and greatest (crappyiest) from Microsoft (VISTA) you'll need to get the full standard edition (i think) as a minimum otherwise face the wrath of the MS legal engine.
    3. I use parallel desktop and an old copy of Windows 2000 Professional, so I can run me finance app.
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  • VMware Fusion for Windows XP

    Hello MacBook Community,
    I recently bought a MacBook Pro (the one for $1199 with I think the 250G harddrive) after being a PC all of my life. I just finished my senior year of high school, so I will be going to college and find more uses for the MacBook once I get there, but in the meantime I want to play games. Yes, I know that is a problem and that is why I asked around and found out that I could use windows on the boot camp. I partitioned my MacBook for 36G of windows XP and took all of the necessary steps. When I tried installing the first game, everything went well, but when I tried actually playing it, it said that my 3d hardware was insufficient and that my directX wasn't good enough. I gave up with that game and installed another and got it installed and loaded it up and when it got to the load screen it force closed with no explanation.
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    Much thanks.

    Taking Applications that are inherently single-threaded and running them on multiple processors is a Classic unsolved problem in Computer Science. This means that Applications will only speed up when they are Hand-coded to run speedily on multiple processors. Although the latest version of Photoshop is Finally seeing this treatment, many more mundane Applications will never be done this way.
    As long as it remains so (which is likely to be permanently) MegaHertz (processor speed) matters, and once you have a handful of processors MegaHertz matters a lot more than number of processors.
    Your list of prospective Mac Pros does not include the Mac you should be considering first, the 6-core 3.33 GHz Westmere, available as a build-to-order option of the four-core mac Pros. It gives you the fastest clock speed of any, and its Hyper-Threading give you 12 effective processing units.
    The premium price of an eight-core or 12-core is so large that you could buy another complete Mac Pro for the same price, and use them separately or as a compute-farm.
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  • Is it safe to use vmware fusion on osx lion

    i was thinking to install vmware fusion so that i could use some windows software which are not available for mac.So should i install it,will it cause any harm to my system??pls help!

    JoeyR wrote:
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  • VMware Fusion or Parallels for running Windows 7 on a portable HD?

    So I have a shiny new MBP 13" with the Haswell chip and I'm trying to totally replace my Dell PC laptop in everyday life.  I cloned my Dell's HD to a USB 3.0 portable HD and am looking at either VMware Fusion 6 or Parallels Desktop 8 to create a VM to run Win7 off of that portable HD.  I only have a 256Gb SSD in my MBP, so I don't want to fill it up with all my Windows stuff.
    Here are my two questions:
    1 - Is this possible to do?
    2 - Based on how I want to use this, does anyone know which VM platform is bes, Fusion 6 or Parallels Desktop 8?
    Thanks!

    Niether. First try Oracle Virtualbox. It is free and runs all OS as good as the paid for virtual machine software programs.
    EDIT:
    Sorry I did not at first read your whole post.
    You can use any of the 3 virtual machine software programs for running most all versions of Windows on your Mac and they all work quite well. But you can not use a version of Windows that came on your Dell PC on any other computer, whether in a virtual machine or installed directly to the hard drive of that computer (Mac or PC), as that version of Windows is tied to your Dell PC and will only work on a Dell PC. It is illegal to put it on some other computer than the one it came on.
    So to run Windows on your Mac, Natively or in a virtual machine, you will need to buy a retail copy, or a System Builders OEM copy, of the version of Windows you want to use.

  • Using a VMware Fusion XP environment with multiple Mac users

    Hi,
    I have installed an XP environment using VMware Fusion. I am only able to start this XP environment when logged in as the user that created it. How can I grant access to this environment to other MAC users on my machine?
    Any input is much appreciated.
    Kind regards, Hans.

    Thanks all, thanks for your input. I have been able to solve it now.
    As suggested I moved the VMWARE file to the shared folder. Then I assigned read/write access rights to the specific users. This is something I had not tried before. Somehow just moving to the shared folder did not change access rights on file level.
    Thanks all,
    Hans.

  • VMWare Fusion and slow system: solution

    Having seen few answers to this problem on the Forum and many posts with the same issue, and finally figuring it out myself, I post a solution to the sluggish behaviour of SnowLeopard when VMWare Fusion 3 is running, and the beachball keeps appearing whenever you do anything else outside Fusion.
    I had allocated a lot of memory to the virtual machine during installation (with 4 Gb on board I thought let's make it fast) but this turns out to be a bad idea.
    • do a restart fo your Mac and wait untill all startup processes have finished (VMWare should NOT be one of the startup processes in this test)
    • turn on the activity monitor and open the tab System Memory.
    • now fire up your virtual machine and check how much memory is set to INactive. In my case this was a lot, reducing free memory to almost zero
    So for any other activity that is going on behind the scenes (emails, dropbox syncs, TimeMachine etc etc), memory swaps are necessary which take time (and may lead to crashes sometimes).
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    • shot down virtual machine (not VMWare Fusion
    • select Virtual Machine > Settings > Processors & RAM and trigger the help file to get instructions depending on your requirements.
    e.g. virtual Windows XP, running only Office or a browser, requires no more then 1 processor, 512 Mb RAM.
    • now start your virtual machine again and check the Memory usage in the Activity Monitor. Your system should be a lot snappier now.

    Sijmons wrote:
    Having seen few answers to this problem on the Forum and many posts with the same issue, and finally figuring it out myself, I post a solution to the sluggish behaviour of SnowLeopard when VMWare Fusion 3 is running, and the beachball keeps appearing whenever you do anything else outside Fusion.
    I had allocated a lot of memory to the virtual machine during installation (with 4 Gb on board I thought let's make it fast) but this turns out to be a bad idea.
    There's a free electronic book (because of sponsorship by VMware): Take Control of VMware Fusion 3" (http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/vmware-fusion-3) that has advice on RAM allocation with VMware Fusion 3 and many other topics. You might find it useful.

  • VMware Fusion v4 on MacBook Pro 17 vs. MacBook Air

    Hello everybody,
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    VWware slows my Mac down so much that both the Mac and the VM become unusable.
    Same thing happened when I installed the Parallels 7 Trial.
    I don't believe that the Mac has any hardware issue - it performs satisfyingly and is as fast as you'd expect from a current model, when not running any virtualization app.
    And here comes the real catch now: on my mid 2011 MacBook Air - which has a slightly slower CPU - VMware is blazingly fast and I can use Mac OS in parallel without hardly noticing that the VM is running.
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    Thanks a lot! Tried what you suggested and it actually seemed to improve VMware Fusion v4 in the beginning but I soon ended up with an estimated 30% of the performance for both the VM and the Mac.
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