After 2 weeks of Fusion 2.0.x, I decided to downgrade to 1.1.3

[skdev56]

I really tried to use 2.0.x, but performance was so slow. Symptoms included very slow boot time, slow launch of application.

I ran procmon to see if it was something on windows, nothing showed up. Tried monitoring the mac side, again nothing

jumping out. I honestly have no idea why 1.1.3 runs an order of magnitude faster on my macbook pro than 2.0.x does.

If anyone has any ideas at all, I might give it another shot.

[gbullman]

The thing I noticed when I went from 1.1.3 to 2.0 was it seemed to be somewhat less forgiving of drivers / utilities that were present in the VM, but not actually supported by hardware. In my case I was using 2 VMs pretty much full time; one was converted from a physical machine (IBM Thinkpad with a number of hardware specific software features) and one was created from scratch with the Fusion Quick Start for Windows. After I upgraded to 2.0 the converted VM booted and shutdown noticeably slower than the one built from scratch. I ended up going through and removing any software that was specific to the source Thinkpad and after that the 2 machines performed comparably in all respects that were noticeable.

I did notice that Fusion 2.0 seemed to put a tiny amount more load on my Mac's CPU (like 1% with an idling VM), but I did not notice a degradation in performance (in fact if anything my boot times improved a little).

Some of the 2.0 features are pretty important to me and I never considered going back (I upgraded in Sept 2008).

[skdev56]

Thanks for the info. I'll try checking to see what might have got installed.

[DannoXYZ]

To remove the old drivers that mentioned:

1. open up a command-prompt window

2. type in SET DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1

3. DEVMGMT.MSC to run the DeviceManager

4. from menu-bar pull down VIEW -> SHOW HIDDEN DEVICES

5. expand each section by clicking on the +

6. delete all greyed-out phantom devices

7. reboot

Enjoy your much, much faster VM. As he mentioned, captured hardware machines typically don't run as fast as clean VMs built from scratch. I try to build VMs from scratch or templates as much as possible. I'll only use captured VMs as a last resort due to some installed software that I don't have the install discs for.

[gbullman]

Thanks for the info. I see all of the thumb drives and other devices that were ever attached to the VM I test these steps on are still there. I guess there is no harm in uninstalling a driver since if you connect the device again it will get re-installed.

[WoodyZ]

I guess there is no harm in uninstalling a driver since if you connect the device again it will get re-installed.

No there is no harm if removing all phantom devices however there typically are a couple that will come back after the reboot but don't worry about then nor try to delete them again because they'll just come back again. As to the USB Devices that have been attached in the past I just removed all the ones that I no longer have but kept the one that I'll attach again and the reason I don't remove them is some of them require a reboot after being detected and I want to avoid having to reboot again when I plug those particular ones in even though I don't use those particular ones that often.