VMware Fusion issue

Dr Galen

Hey all,

Hopefully someone might be able to shed a bit of light on this for me.

A colleague is using a 6 month old MBP for work, and is using VMWare Fusion to allow him to access all the office stuff. We operate pretty much eveything internally on windows, and have a few databases and stuff that requires him to do this unfortunately.

Everything had been running grand until about 2 weeks ago. When things seem to have slowed to a crawl, and I mean a crawl. When Fusion isn't running, the MBP runs great, no issues. Once he gets that going though things go sour.

In the Windows XP enviroment, things are noticeably slower than they were a few weeks ago. Once he goes to open a file from our central server, the windows end of things just locks and freezes. Sometimes it will pull throughitself, other times it won't. During this time, the MBP end of things, while slow, still functions.

VM Ware is set to use 1.5GB of the 4GB on the MBP.

Nothing has been installed on the MBP in the last while, and we've scanned for viruses etc. Really wouldn't be my area of expertise at all, so any help would be deadly.

Any thoughts?

Cheers

DrG

nesf

If it's mission critical stuff, like work, he's far better off working off a Bootcamp partition than VMWare if it's processor/memory intensive. It's relatively trivial for him to set up dual booting with Windows which allows him a native full Windows environment to work in when he needs to do work stuff. He can use VMWare to virtualise this partition to allow him the option of working off VMWare if he needs to.

Long story short: this is by far the simplest way to solve technical issues and make your life as simple as possible in such a situation.


If he's determined to go the VMWare route, ensure that the software is fully up to date and reinstall VMWare tools on it.

Dr Galen

Cheers nesf

Initially when he bought the MBP I was trying to get him to either a) use Mac versions of the software (which is entirely possible for most things) or b) set up the dual boot option. He didn't go that route in the end, and effectively cloned his old laptop using the VMWare tools onto the MBP.

Strange thing is, that nothing that he wants to do are that intensive. Sure, the excel files in particular are a bit big, but nothing mental either, and up until about 3 weeks ago (before holidays) there wasn't a problem. Everything worked pretty good tbh, and apparently nothing has changed.

I'm going to have a good look at the thing today. I'm convinced that something somewhere on the XP environment has gone a bit awry. Either something new has been installed or updated which is hogging resources, or maybe something a bit nastier.

This sort of thing wouldn't really be my area of expertise tbh, I moved to Mac ages ago to get away from Windows, and have a cheapo windows laptop for anything that I really need it for. When most everything I need can run under Mac OS, feking around with VMs and the like seems silly to me

nesf

Eh, VMs are handy, they can just be troublesome and if you're not technically minded they can be a bitch to deal with. When they work right they're a breeze to work with, when they don't they can be very temperamental.

It's quite possibly a virus or something, but it could be something more subtle.