Tips for Windows 7 RC 64 bit with VMWare Fusion
Posted on søndag, mai 17, 2009 @ 21:53:31 by david
After poking around on the internet, I found some new tips with using VMWare Fusion and Windows.
Why even bother with Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC)?
I need to test some of our websites using Internet Explorer 8 and since I bought a license of VMWare Fusion I can use Windows 7 RC for free before it gets released.
I downloaded and tried the Windows 7 Beta back in January, and did a lot of testing with a beta of IE8 before it was released. Just recently I deleted that Virtual Machine to now install the latest Windows 7 RC.
Installing Windows 7 RC the wrong way
On the day Windows 7 RC came out, I downloaded the 32-bit version and have been using it with IE8 without any problems. But the system is slow...
The issues I see are slow performance issues because my system disk is getting full :(
I have maxed out my MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM (its only recognizes 3GB of it) and so I try to run PhotoShop CS3, Mail, iCal, MSN Messenger, NeoOffice, and a few other programs at the same time... it just doesn't work that way.
So I looked around online, and found a few tips on how to improve performance for running Virtual Machines.
I found out that:
- I installed the wrong version
- I installed it on my system disk
Installing Windows 7 RC the right way
On a weblog by Andrew Grant called ShinyThings I saw an article about Tips for VMWare Fusion Performance and realized that I needed to be using the 64-bit version of Windows 7 RC.
The article also mentions a few other ways to use VMWare Fusion that I hadn't thought of:
- Get as much RAM as possible... done.
- Even if you have a Dual Core machine, dont use those options
- Use a 64-bit version
- Use virtual SCSI drives
- and the final HUGE tip was to run the Virtual Machine on an external disk
This last tip makes a lot of sense. I am downloading the 64-bit version now of Windows 7 RC, which I will be installing tomorrow on an external drive :)
Thanks agin Andrew.
