VMWare Player - swapping to disk more if more memory allocated

Question

Windows XP as base OS. Laptop has 4GB RAM and 2*2.2GHz cores. About 3 year old laptop

Am using Windows7 in VMWare Player. If I allocate more than 1GB of RAM to the Win7 machine in the VMWare player settings it goes so slow, and is continually swapping to disk.

I've turned off all Win7 processor intensive stuff.

http://www.computingunleashed.com/speed-up-windows-7-ultimate-guide-to.html

http://www.computingunleashed.com/list-of-services-in-windows-7-that-can.html

The base OS only reports using aboiut 144MB of RAM to the player. Very weird.

I'm using 2 virtual disks: 20GB SCSI for c:\ and 25GB SCSI for data f:\

Problem: How to tweak Win7 VMware (ie VS2010, Sql2008R2) well on an older laptop. Or use something else?

Answer 1

The problem is that by default vmware player uses file as memory. Read this for more info & fix http://communities.vmware.com/thread/46122

Answer 2

If you want to achieve this for all your VMs, you may just add/append following two lines:

 prefvmx.minVmMemPct = 100
 mainMem.useNamedFile = "false"

... inside the following VMware-wide configuration file:

C:/ProgramData/VMware/VMware Workstation/config.ini (or sometimes settings.ini)

The first line sets the percentage of configured VM memory that should fit into the host memory and the second (as already shown in the prior answer) disables default file-based memory usage.

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If you want to apply this to a specific VM only, in order to not alter general VMware configuration, adding the following line to the VM's *.vmx file may be an alternative:

 hard-disk.hostBuffer = "disabled"