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SeaStar
Contributor
Contributor

Vista on Boot camp

Hello,

I've been trying to use my Boot camp partition (Vista Ultimate installed in it) with Vmware 1.0. on a MacBook with OS X 10.4.10

The overall experience is quite disappointing with the following problems.

\- extremely slow operation of the virtual machine (practically impossible to work normally)

\- frequent crashes of the virtual machine (fortunately leaving OS X unaffected)

\- Damages to the Vista installation, (most of time the damages can be repaired by reinstalling the Boot Camp drivers)

Am I the only one to experience this? Am I doing something wrong?

Cheers

Luca

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Andreas_Masur
Expert
Expert

Am I the only one to experience this? Am I doing

something wrong?

Luca,

Can you provide some more information about your system as well as your virtual machine setup? Things like MacBook/MacBook Pro, memory of it and so on. Same goes for the virtual machine...how many CPUs assigned, how much memory assigned etc.

Thanks.

Ciao, Andreas

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SeaStar
Contributor
Contributor

Hello Andreas,

I'm running a standard MacBook 2.16Ghz (Core 2 Duo) with 2Gb of ram

The OS is 10.4.10.

On the Virtual machine side it was running in single CPU mode with 768Mb of ram (increasing to 1200Mb didn't improve anything). The network connection was in bridged mode. Bluetooth disconnected. Boot Camp Is running with 80GB of disk space with Vista Ultimate.

One of the most annoying things was the continuous reinstallation of several device drivers including the network drivers. (I never reached the end of the VMware tools installation as the VM is always freezing before the end)

Let me know if you need more info.

Cheers

Luca

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SeaStar
Contributor
Contributor

I just forgot to mention that:

Battery: pass power sypply status to guest

display: NO 3D acceleration

CD/DVD: automatically detect

Sound: Connected

No shared folders

IR receiver connected

Bluetooth disconnected

iSight connected

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SeaStar
Contributor
Contributor

Just a last comment: In windows the task manager was showing a constant 100% of CPU usage, while in OS X Activity monitor, VMware fusion was not taking more than 2% of the CPU performance.

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Immortal
Immortal

The Fusion process in Activity Monitor is just the GUI, you need to look at the root-owned vmware-vmx (with the guest at 100%, I would expect vmware-vmx to also be at 100%). What's taking up all the CPU in the guest?

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Andreas_Masur
Expert
Expert

In addition to Eric....take a look at the following:

Fusion running very slow. 100%[/url]

Ciao, Andreas

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SeaStar
Contributor
Contributor

Etung,

I checked the process that are running. The most resource intensive is the Task manager (taskmgr.exe) swinging between 2% and 20%. This doesn't really make sense since the CPU usage is at 100% and the sum of all processes seems to be way below 100%. Tried to switch off startup applications like Avast antivirus, but it didn't really help.

You are right the vmware-vmx root process is close to 100%.

Cheers

Luca

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Andreas_Masur
Expert
Expert

I checked the process that are running. The most

resource intensive is the Task manager (taskmgr.exe)

swinging between 2% and 20%. This doesn't really

make sense since the CPU usage is at 100% and the

sum of all processes seems to be way below 100%.

What user level do you have with your account? Administrator? User?

In addition, make sure that the option 'Show processes from all users' (bottom of process list) is checked.

Ciao, Andreas

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Rzn8tor
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Have you scanned your system for malware?

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SeaStar
Contributor
Contributor

Hi Andreas,

my account level is administrator.

The process that is taking all the resources is the NT kernel.

Image name: System

User Name: SYSTEM

CPU: something between 85% and 96%

Memory: 152k

Description: NT Kernel & System

I've checked also for malware. The system is clean.

Cheers

Luca

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Andreas_Masur
Expert
Expert

Luca,

Most of the time, this is caused by a wrong device driver. Typically, this is not really obvious to find. Does the device manager point out anything obvious (exclamation marks)? If not, you can start disabling device by device and see when the CPU load will decrease...the last driver you disabled would be the culprit...

Ciao, Andreas

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