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bob417
Contributor
Contributor

WHY I REVERTED TO 2.0.7 FROM 3.1.1

After having successfully run Fusion 2 for about a year, I decided to opt for the special offer to upgrade to Version 3.1.1 for 9.99- unfortunately, sometimes if an offer seems too good to be true, it is Smiley Sad Unlike Version 2.0.7, which basically provides rock solid performance, version 3.1.1 turned out to be quirky and unstable. The Unity mode, in particular, while including some new features, seems especially prone to problems. Erratic freezes of my virtual XP machine, links within browsers in the virtual machine that sometimes work and sometimes don't. The general "smoothness" of operation in version 2 appears not have made it into version 3. If there is any good news at all, it's that I was able to uninstall version 3 and reinstall version 2 without any difficulty. All the quirkiness I experienced in version 3 is now gone and I am happy to be back to version 2. To be fair to VMware, I should mention that I did not opt for the 30 day free trial of the upgrade, believing that version 3 would be an improvement- for me it was not. Also, while I did seek support in the community forums, I did not contact VMware for help. My observations are based on my "out-of-the-box" experience with the upgrade.

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RParker
Immortal
Immortal

My observations are based on my "out-of-the-box" experience with the upgrade.

Seems you are not alone. Numerous complaints about the same thing all over this forum. Maybe VM Ware got a 30 day trial of the programmers as well to create Fusion Smiley Wink

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Also, while I did seek support in the community forums, I did not contact VMware for help.

This is your first post here; which community forums did you seek support in?

Based on your description, my guess is that Tools were trying to update. When running a virtual machine with Tools for the first time after an update/upgrade, you want to let it sit for a little bit for things to settle down.

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bob417
Contributor
Contributor

Good catch on being my first post- I had posted from my work computer under a different account. In terms of waiting for "things to settle down", I installed, uninstalled, reinstalled both the upgrade and the tools several times and I am confident that the installation itself went properly. Based on some of the other posts that I have since read here, I don't think that I am the only one have problems with the stability of the 3.1.1 upgrade. My comments were based on my "out of the box" experience with the upgrade it is certainly possible that those persons who are installing Fusion 3.1.1 as a "new" program as opposed to an upgrade are not experiencing the same type of problems that upgraders are experiencing. Since the 9.99 upgrade offer is relatively recent, it will be interesting to see other's comments here in the forum once they do their own upgrades. But I certainly appreciate your input and suggestions.

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ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

Keep in mind that there's also many people who've upgraded without issue. Without more information, like OS host version and hardware, and VM configuration, it's impossible to troubleshoot the issues. One of the big things is that XP VM's really need to either be manually altered to align their partition, or re-created from scratch in version 3. Did you do that?

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ozarkcanoer
Contributor
Contributor

I too had been happy with Fusion 2 on my iMac 2.4Ghz, 10.6.4 system but took advantage of the $10 upgrade offer.

I've found Fusion 3.1.1 to be slower with spinning beach balls on resuming from a suspend of my Windows XP VM.

Is there a VMWare document describing how to align a VM or recreate it so it is faster? I didn't find anything with Fusion 3 that said anything about it. If I can't find out how to do this and or it doesn't improve the situation I'll probably use Time Machine to go back to Fusion 2 or just reinstall Fusion 2.

Thanks for any help.

Larry

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Rick_Schlander
Contributor
Contributor

Bob,

I would be interested to see if removing version 2 completely and installing version 3 as a "new" install will fix your performance issues.

Rick

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bob417
Contributor
Contributor

I have to agree with ozarkcanoer that I did not see any information about realigning the partition or creating a new VM machine. The instructions received from VMware regarding the upgrade from version 2 to version 3.1.1 seemed pretty straight-forward. Essentially download the upgrade and install it right over the version 2 installation. I may try creating a new VM machine to see if that helps since I am a bit of a tinkerer, but if some additional computer gymnastics are required, it would probably behoove VMware to make that a bit clearer.

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bob417
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks Rick for your suggestion- that is certainly another option that I might explore, at least insofar as the Version 3.1.1 trial version is concerned- I am not certain that the upgrade key will also work in a brand new install of version 3.1.1. I do appreciate all the responses and posts regarding this topic, although I once again would like to point out that the instructions from VMware were pretty clear about doing the upgrade--- essentially download and install. I suspect from the number of posts I am now seeing here online indicate that others are having some difficulty coming to grips with issues in the upgrade to version 3.1.1, and when and if I find some time to tinker around, i may pursue those options.

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wila
Immortal
Immortal

Hello,

There's two things you might want to do for better performance with existing windows XP guests.

1) Partition alignment

2) Turn off hard disk buffering, preferably after doing the partition alignment.

Here's links to steps on how-to do this. They are in the same thread, but because it is such a huge thread, i'll post direct links to the most important parts.

for steps for 1) and for steps on 2)

Beware to take a backup copy of your VM before you align your partition(s), just in the case something goes wrong during the process. It is always better to be safe as sorry with operations like these.

Hope this helps,



--
Wil
_____________________________________________________
VI-Toolkit & scripts wiki at http://www.vi-toolkit.com

Contributing author at blog www.planetvm.net

Twitter: @wilva

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva
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ozarkcanoer
Contributor
Contributor

Just wanted to update this post since in May I bought a new quad-core iMac, running full time in 64 bit kernal mode, and now have updated to Fusion 3.1.3.  My XP virtual machine runs acceptably under 3.1.3 so I'll stick with it, though I've pretty much switched full time to Windows 7 running as a VM under VirtualBox. 

I also wanted to have Fusion 3.1.3 working before I upgrade to OS X 10.7 (Lion) which won't run Fusion 2 as I understand it.

Larry

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