Paging Mac FOAK: Fusion on Mac; advice please

So, I'm sick and tired of the shitty dell I have at work.

I have a nice enough 2 year old macbook (2GHz Intel Core
Duo, 2GB RAM, 200GB HD). So... I install VMWare on the Macbook and run
VMWare Converter over the dell machine.

And then run as a virtual machine under fusion. It works but it crawls.
Looking at the activity monitor the free memory seems to be around
20-30MB (which I think is low) but there's generally also about 200MB
inactive. The processor load is generally around 40-50% or so.

I run Vista under a VM on my mac mini which has a similar spec without
problems- only differences being that the mac mini has 4GB of memory.

So what's the conclusion, too little memory on the macbook?

 

That should be plenty of memory - have you checked the Fusion
preferences to see how much memory you've allocated to the VM?

Haven't tried Fusion for a while now, so things may have changed - but I
did find it was quite fussy about how much memory you gave it.

Also consider that you may have really confused the Windows setup in
transporting it from one machine to another.

 

No, haven't looked at this, just took the defaults (as I have with the
Vista instance I've got for running Microsoft Money. Will have a look.

I thought this was the whole point of VM Ware converter, that it was
meant to let you do this. They pretty much sell fusion as being capable
of doing this on the VMWare website.

 

Oh, it'll do it - I tried it with a netbook image last year - I think it
settled in the end, once Windows had had a bit of a hissy fit over the
hardware changing.

 

I was really disappointed with Fusion when I bought it in a Promo bundle
some time ago, but then I also did the conversion from an existing VM.
It ran terribly slowly, and was unreliable too.

I recently upgraded it using the special offer they were running, and
did a clean install, and find it runs just fine, in Unity mode it's just
about transparent in performance differences against a similar PC box.

Running on a MacBook 2.2 with 4GB of RAM here. Personally I'd say that
2GB was a little on the low side, but should be usable as long as you
don't run too many apps at once.

 

Agreed. My Macbook has 4GB RAM, and runs XP/Vista/7 VMs just fine, but
when one of my memory modules failed and I was down to 2GB for a while,
running VMs with anything else running on the machine would be painful.
My recommendation to the OP would be buy another 2GB of memory, and
all will likely be well.

 

I've never had any issues with converter.

I think you could do with more RAM in the Macbook, and possibly more
allocated to the VM.

Are you *sure* the mini and the book are running the same CPU?

--
Catman MIB#14 SKoGA#6 TEAR#4 BOTAFOF#38 Apostle#21 COSOC#3
Tyger, Tyger Burning Bright (Remove rust to reply)
116 Giulietta 3.0l Sprint 1.7 GTV TS GT 3.2 V6
Triumph Sprint ST 1050: It's blue, see.
www.cuore-sportivo.co.uk

 

gurgled happily, sounding much like they were
saying:

Are you running the VM as "app windows" or as a single "vm window"?

I found that making the apps go into individual windows murdered
performance.

 

I'd say so. 2GB doesn't leave much space for OS X and Vista - you're
probably looking at VM memory of about 1GB and I don't think that's
enough for Vista and whatever applications you need to run.