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From: David Empson on 1 Jun 2010 07:27
John <jwolf6589(a)NOSPAMgmail.com> wrote:

> I am so sick and tired of the lame Mac BB app and the many limitations
> of Entourage.

[After some guesswork, I assume BB means "Blackberry".]

> I am thinking about VMWare Fusion. How is it? Parallels was slow on my 2GB
> RAM Mac running WinXP (I have high standards for performance). Would it
> run fast on my Mac, and would I easily be able to sync with my BB, and use
> Outlook 2003 for XP on the Mac?

What Mac model and operating system version, and which version of
Parallels did you try?

If you are using the same computer on which you found Parallels slow,
and the computer still has 2 GB of RAM, then it is very unlikely that
you will have a better experience with VMware Fusion.

The most likely performance issue is that with 2 GB of RAM, there isn't
really enough to reserve a reasonable amount for the virtual machine and
still have plenty to run Mac applications at the same time. If you quit
all your Mac applications while running the virtual machine, or were
able to limit XP to a smaller amount of memory, you may find it gets
good enough performance.

A virtual machine still won't be as fast as booting directly into
Windows on the same computer, since the VM has to share the CPU with Mac
OS X, and all I/O operations performed by Windows inside the VM must be
processed by the VM software and passed to Mac OS X.

--
David Empson
dempson(a)actrix.gen.nz
From: Scott Lowe on 1 Jun 2010 20:00
On 2010-06-01 06:32:02 -0400, John said:

> I am so sick and tired of the lame Mac BB app and the many limitations
> of Entourage. I am thinking about VMWare Fusion. How is it? Parallels
> was slow on my 2GB RAM Mac running WinXP (I have high standards for
> performance). Would it run fast on my Mac, and would I easily be able to
> sync with my BB, and use Outlook 2003 for XP on the Mac?


Although you didn't specify which version of Mac OS X you're running,
it's unlikely that you'll get satisfactory performance on a Windows
XP-based virtual machine with only 2GB of RAM on the physical system.
If you give enough RAM for the Windows XP VM to perform satisfactorily,
Mac OS X will be unhappy. Conversely, to keep Mac OS X happy, you'd be
unable to give the VM enough RAM.

This is not a VMware Fusion or Parallels problem; it's simply a fact of
using virtualization. Each OS has its memory requirements and its
overhead, and there's no magic way around it.

That being said, I do believe that VMware Fusion is a tad more
efficient at memory usage than Parallels, so you might see slightly
better performance. This would be especially true if you avoid
launching or running other apps while your VM is running.

Hope this helps!

--
Scott Lowe
Author, "Mastering VMware vSphere 4" and "VMware vSphere 4
Administration Instant Reference"
http://blog.scottlowe.org

From: doublePlusPaleo on 2 Jun 2010 22:17
On 2010-06-03 09:37:05 +1000, John <jwolf6589(a)NOSPAMgmail.com> said:
>
>> If you are using the same computer on which you found Parallels slow,
>> and the computer still has 2 GB of RAM, then it is very unlikely that
>> you will have a better experience with VMware Fusion.
>>
>> The most likely performance issue is that with 2 GB of RAM, there isn't
>> really enough to reserve a reasonable amount for the virtual machine and
>> still have plenty to run Mac applications at the same time. If you quit
>> all your Mac applications while running the virtual machine, or were
>> able to limit XP to a smaller amount of memory, you may find it gets
>> good enough performance.
>
> If you have evidence then show me a screen movie and then I may believe!

Oh the irony!

From: doublePlusPaleo on 3 Jun 2010 09:05
On 2010-06-03 09:37:05 +1000, John <jwolf6589(a)NOSPAMgmail.com> said:

>> If you are using the same computer on which you found Parallels slow,
>> and the computer still has 2 GB of RAM, then it is very unlikely that
>> you will have a better experience with VMware Fusion.
>>
>> The most likely performance issue is that with 2 GB of RAM, there isn't
>> really enough to reserve a reasonable amount for the virtual machine and
>> still have plenty to run Mac applications at the same time. If you quit
>> all your Mac applications while running the virtual machine, or were
>> able to limit XP to a smaller amount of memory, you may find it gets
>> good enough performance.
>
> If you have evidence then show me a screen movie and then I may believe!

I can vouch for the excellent performance of VMWare. Let me tell you
how well it works in the real world.

I occasionally maintain a very large Windows application which I
developed many years ago. It is written in C++ and consists of nearly
200 source code files. It was developed in the days of Windows 2000
and Visual Studio 6.0. Today for various reasons, it is not practical
to install Visual Studio 6.0 directly on more modern Windows, so I use
VMWare to run it under a virtualized Windows 2000 hosted on XP Pro on
an elderly (2006 vintage) dual core box with only 2GB of RAM and a
relatively puny E6300 (Allendale) 1.86GHz CPU.

When I need to maintain this old code, I launch VMWare, launch Visual
Studio, make the changes and then recompile it. The recompilation
process runs faster virtualized than it ran natively on a Tualatin
Pentium III CPU.

Compiling a large codebase works a system's memory and HDD very hard
indeed, even when not virtualized. I have absolutely no problems doing
all of this in 2GB when virtualized.

I wouldn't tell you mistruths because I am an atheist.

I hope that helps.





From: nospam on 3 Jun 2010 18:09
In article <jollyroger-1B391F.14043703062010(a)news.individual.net>,
Jolly Roger <jollyroger(a)pobox.com> wrote:

> > > i've used vmware in 2 gig and it's horribly slow, and that's just
> > > launching vmware or doing simple things in windows. i would hate to try
> > > anything more involved. even with 4 gig it thrashes sometimes.
> >
> > Then there is something fundamentally wrong with your installation.
>
> Something's fundamentally wrong with his brain as well. He's probably
> making that statement based on his experience running VMware on a
> machine with 2 GB of RAM but also running all sorts of other
> memory-hungry applications at the same time.

baseless speculation on your part, and wrong, as usual. just vmware.
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