Fusion 3.1.1 - MacBook Pro - gradually slowing down...

[Bgrant123]

Hi Experts

have spent a lot of time on Google, as well as searching these boards for some advise, but alas, haven't managed to find anything. I'm hoping someone here has had the same experience as me, and a way around it.....

Running a MacBook Pro - 4GB RAM with Intel Core Duo processors.... Laptop is around 9 months old...

Started with Fusion v3.0 - I have 2 VM Images - one running XP and the other WIndows 2003 Server (for demo purposes)

I NEVER run them both at the same time as I have no need to. I use the XP one on a daily basis. The image has 1GB RAM allocated with 40GB Hard Drive

Everything was fine for a while, but slowly but surely the Mac is slowing down when I launch the VM. The main offenders are Safari and Entourage (for email), but even opening the finder window is a laborious task now. The VM itself is also dog-slow when its up and running - almost unusable...

The weird thing is - as I say - that it used to be fine, and its gotten worse over the past few months - I cannot work out what has caused this happen to happen (so that I could reverse it)

Some other important points:

Currently have around 150GB free hard disk space on the Mac itself

Have 14GB free on the XP Image hard drive

All the while my Mac is freezing, Activity Monitor shows that VM is using 1.15 GB of RAM (Which is fine), and the CPU rarely gets above 15%

Looks as though the Mac still has some spare resources - RAM/CPU - and its not that which is causing the slow downs...

Have upgraded Fusion as the updates have come along - currently running 3.1.1

Does anyone have any guidance as to tweaks or anything similar I can try - its still getting worse!

Cheers

[profpr]

Does anyone have a solution to Bgrant123's problem? I have exactly the same issues. Fusion is completely unusable - running either windows 7 or xp on fusion 3.1.1 on a MacBook pro. It takes hours to boot up and then is so slow as to be useless. The fan is on all the time so it's really noisy, and the processor gets really hot - but there are no obvious culprit processes in either the Mac or windows task managers.

I've deinstalled and reinstalled fusion and set up new virtual machines and run old ones. The XP version used to run fine on (I think) fusion 2.2. But ever since I've upgraded it's been awful. I suspect some conflict somewhere, but what could it be. I really don't want to have to reinstall the Mac operating system if I can avoid it.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Make sure you only allocate 1 CPU to the VM.

Also, disabling system restore inside the VM, removing antivirus in the VM (particularly Norton or AVG) are known to help with performance. Last, did you do the initial XP install using the Easy install wizard in VM 3?

How much RAM is left free?

[profpr]

Thanks for your comments. I had tried all of them previously except the system restore and nothing had worked. I am pretty certain that it was some sort of system conflict – so all I had to do was find the cause (???!!! ) Don’t believe anyone when they say Macs don’t have these problems. They do.

However, things are much better now. What I have done is (roughly in order – but there seems to have been a bit of a cumulative effect

so I am not sure which has done most good):

1) uninstalled HP Scanjet software completely

2) got rid of a lot of redundant leftover files and plists

to do with PDANet and PocketMac software, which appeared to be causing all

sorts of circular process calls (showed up on the Console log and activity

monitor). I had to reinstall and then uninstall these.

3) got rid of various processes that didn’t seem to be doing anything useful (can’t remember

which they were now – sorry). One of them was Bezel services which seemed to be

a known problem according to a number of helpsites

4) deleted any references to any of these programs from

plists and com.apple.launchd (you have to manually enable search system files

in the Finder in order to find these files)

5) used applejack auto several times, shutting down between

each run

6) installed a new copy of VMWare Fusion 3.1.1 - but opened my old Windows file

I am now up and running again. It’s not yet perfect, but

it’s at least usable and VM Fusion doesn’t freeze up the whole computer.