Windows 10 guest painfully slow

[cbolin]

I just purchased a license for Fusion 8.0.   Installed on 10.11 El Capitan.

Created a brand new Windows 10 guest.  Updated Windows 10 afterward.

Performance is just horrid - unusable - unresponsive, slow to draw anything, apps take many seconds to even start rendering.   I did have Parallels before on the same machine running Win 8.1 and decided to change to Fusion.   Performance on that platform was fluid but the licensing and support from Parallels is poor.

I don't know how to even begin "troubleshooting"...  It is just unusable out of the box.  My machine is far from "newer" but both El Capitan and Parallels previous worked as expected.

Any direction would be appreciated. 

iMac (24-inch, Early 2009)

Processor:  3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

Memory: 8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3

Graphics:  NVIDIA GeForce GT 130 512 MB

[cbolin]

Just converted the Windows 7 and the Windows 8.1 Parallels VMs I imported and also really, really slow.  Both were really responsive on Mavericks with Parallels.

I've tried increasing the video and memory allocated to the VMs.

Any suggestions, anyone?

[wila]

Hi,

Please attach a vmware.log file to a reply down here and I will have a look if there's something that stands out.

--

Wil

[Woodmeister50]

Be sure to uninstall Parallels Tools in the VMs.

Also, make sure you are properly provisioning resources in the VM settings (VM RAM, VM VRAM, CPUs, etc.)

as some settings don't necessarily carry over.

Also note that Windows10 is somewhat more resource intensive than Windows8.1 which can be "amplified"

on older hardware.

Added edit:

FWIW, I have Windows10 VMs which were upgraded in VMWare from Windows8.1 and Windows7 which were

imported from Parallels (Windows10 imports had the dreaded activation issue).  On both machines, Windows10

is running pretty much the same as it did in Parallels.  The two Mac are:

  late 2013 27" iMac, 3.2GHz quad core i5, 32 GB RAM, 256GB SSD

  early 2011 13" MacbookPro, 2.7GHz dual core i7, 16GB RAM, 240GB SSD

VMs are set up identically as follows:

    Processors -> 2 cores

    Memory -> 8192 MB

    Display -> Accelerated 3D graphics

    Display RAM -> 1GB

Note: I always use the VMs in full screen mode.

[wila]

Hello,

While that setup works for you, his hardware is vastly different, if he tries that config it will certainly be very slow, if it even boots at all.

His hardware only has 8GB, so using that in your VM plus 1GB for video card ... won't work.

Suggested max config for the hardware used by the topic starter:

- 1 vCPU max

- 4 GB max, better to use 3GB, but 4 might still work

- try accelerated 3D, but if it doesn't work well, turn it off as you'll be giving back CPU+RAM to the host to use.

--

Wil

[bxlewi1]

On my 2013 retina Macbook Pro, VMWare clients are laggy graphically when run under either Yosemite or El Capitan. This laptop running Mavericks and the VMWare of the time was very snappy. During the transition from Mavericks to Yosemite the performance degraded noticeably. Additionally running a comparable VM under Parallels is snappy where the VMWare client is laggy. This is particularly noticeable when scrolling or snapping windows. Client doesn't seem to matter, both Windows 8.1 and 10 are the same lag wise. Doesn't seem to matter to the configuration of the vm.

I would rather continue using VMWare as I find it a better overall product than Parallels, however it can be downright painful to use.