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Anyone have much experience with VMWare virtual machines?

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shmokes:
I'm using VMWare Workstation 9 and the first time I used my virtual Windows 7 box it worked fine, but ever since then it's running so poorly. I can only really describe it as stuttering. Like, it goes completely unresponsive for 5 seconds, then works fine for 5 seconds, then unresponsive for 5 seconds, then fine for 5 seconds. It's infuriating. I've restarted both the virtual and host machines, but I can't figure it out. It still has plenty of free hard drive space allocated to it, as well as 2 GB of RAM. I think I gave it plenty of resources.

lordnacho:
I'm running Win7 in 4 gigs, VMWare Player(free one), runs fine but just using for basic stuff.  2 gigs is the minimum requirements for the 64 bit, might want to allocate more depending what you are using it for.   What apps are you running? 

Oh and check the task manager to see how it's handling the memory and if any procs are spiking. 

drventure:
Haven't upgraded to 9 yet, but I'm using the latest version 8.

I've used VMware workstation for, yikes, almost a decade. Of all the virtualizing products I've used, in my experience, VMWare trumps them all for stability and speed in the VM, but, I've still had some issues from time to time.

I'm guessing your host doesn't have those problems?

I'd try checking out taskman, on both the host and guest, to see if there's anything chewing up tons of CPU.

Second, I'd make sure that if you had any network mappings, that they're all still valid. Mappings pointing to non-existent devices have caused me similar probs in the past

Next, you might check the VMware forums. They've helped me out a number of times in the past on issues with vm networking, USB, etc, so there might be something there.

MonMotha:
Is this a laptop?

Check in your BIOS for an option along the lines of "Always run the system timer" or "Run timers while in low power CPU states".  Some desktops may have this, too, but it's very common on laptops as it buys some power savings if that's disabled, so it's usually the default.

Of course, your machine may be doing this and not have an option to fix it, in which case I guess get a different computer.

Also, try the Windows Virtual PC, Xen, Linux KVM, etc. and see if they do the same thing.

shmokes:
Thanks for the tips. Nothing immediately jumps out. I'll check out the BIOS. I haven't had a chance yet. But it's a desktop so I won't hold my breath. Task Manager reveals nothing. Neither the Host nor virtual machines are using substantial CPU cycles . . . and there's no rhyme or reason to the freezes. It'll sometimes freeze on a spike when the CPU registers at 30% or something, but other times it'll be frozen at 0%. Similarly the memory is more than 3/4 free. Also, I'm not running anything taxing. Almost nothing is even installed on the machine and it's having these problems right off that bat from the moment it hits the desktop. Much more and I'll try scrapping it and starting from scratch, but I hate to do that rather than understanding what happened.

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