Would a new Mac run W7 better

[bobc622]

First off, I am not a techie so please answer in the plainest language possible and assume I know nothing. Thanks.

I am running a 24" iMac with 2.8 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo and am maxed out at 4GB of Ram OSX 10.6.7. I have looked ay my Activity Monitor and when VMWare Fusion 3.1.2 is running W7 and Quicken Home and Business 2010, I see as little as 35 MB Fee RAM. Does that sound right? On the Mac side I have Mail, Safari, a Weather program, Mobile Me synching automatically and the my Time Machine is backing up. These are apps that run at normal times and not always together.

Most of the the time, when I am using VMWare, the icon in my dock spends a lot of time with the little clock going round and round and I see the Mac symbol I call a spinning pizza popping up. When I try to force quit, I see VMWare not reponding, but wait long enough, and it finally suspends or restarts.

Questions:

(Caveat: I do not download a lot of videos, work with lots of graphics or music. I am just an old geezer that uses the Net, runs Quicken on both W7 and Snow Leopard 10.6.7 and might do some HTML editing now and then on the Windows side because that's where I learned to do a web page.)

With my present Mac, am I asking too much of VMWare?

Is there a routine I can use to alleviate this agonizing slowness or reaction to commands?

If I get a new Mac is there an 21.5" iMac offered that has faster processors that will benefit me.

Should I max out to 16GB RAM in the new Mac to assure good performance and speed?

Can anyone recommend exactly what iMac I should get ( looking forward to Lion) after seeing my usage?

Many thanks for trying to interpret these questions.

Bob

[syed786ghouse]

VMware Fusion requires a Mac with at least 1 GB of RAM. However, your computer did had enough memory to meet the both the system requirements for Mac OS X and the requirements for the operating system that you intend to run on the virtual machine. eg: Windows 7 requires a computer with at least 1 GB of RAM. VMware recommends a computer with at least 2 GB of RAM for best performance... Since you have installed some softwares & tools I believe you should MAX your RAM to 8 GB ... I hope this should resolve your problem....

Syed

[cmasters]

How many CPU's & how much memory do you have assigned to the W7 VM? (Virtual Machine>>Settings>>Processors & RAM). Perhaps these are set too high. For what you're using it for I can't see a need to have more than one CPU. And your VM's RAM allocation shouldn't need to be more than 1 GB either.

Bear in mind with modern OS's Free RAM is a liability more than an asset (although in your case 35MB is not so good). If there is too much free memory it means the OS is not using your fastest storage medium as much as possible. What you want to look at is page outs. Excessive page outs is an indication your system is being memory starved. Here's a nice article for understanding RAM types in the Activity Monitor: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1342

If you've verified that your VM is not over-taxing your system and your seeing a lot of page outs, sort the activity monitor by Real Memory and see what processes are using the most memory. VMWare will use a little bit more than what you've allocated (for example I have a 2GB VM that is using 2.17 GB Real - process is called vmware-vmx) My Main VMware Fusion app only uses around 83MB.

Hope all this helps.

[bobc622]

Thanks for your replies,

How does one know if I have excessive page outs? Right now I am looking at 26.02GB page ins and 13.97GB page outs. Those figures mean nothing to me. Out of 4GB RAM I have less than ½ GB free. It says I have used 3.55GB Ram and I am really doing nothing except running my normal activities which consists of a bunch of things like Mail and background apps like weather, calendars, mobile me synch, time machine sync. The top Real memory user is vmware-vmx at 1.28GB.

[cmasters · Accepted solution]

For starters I would say the best way would be to restart your mac before taking measurements. If you read the Apple article it should have explained the different memory types reported on the Activity Monitor and it states that page-outs are when the Operating System has to write from RAM to the Hard Disk. The reason for it doing this is because one or more of your running tasks is requesting more memory than is currently available so the OS is accommodating by moving the oldest idle chunks of code and memory to your hard drive thus making space for the RAM your app is requesting. What that 13.97GB of page-outs mean is that since you last started your mac, it has had to write out a total of 13.97GB from RAM (memory) to Hard Disk (swap). That means that since you last started your mac the applications running on it have gone over 4GB by 13.97 GB's (added up over time). So my recommendation is to restart your mac and after you login, start the activity monitor (keeping it sorted by Real Memory) and one-by-one load up your applications and see where the page-outs start happening and keep track of what processes were on top before and after each app you run is.

You vm does not appear to be using too much memory but the combined total of it plus the other applications you are running may make your computer memory starved. Once you get all your apps running the page-outs will tell you by how much your short on memory (if you are, that is).

Also bear in mind that when loading/suspending/stopping a VM these are disk intensive operations. So for example, if you're mac is backing up (time machine sync) the same time you're launching or resuming a VM its going to take extra time to complete because both of these operations are occurring on one disk and it only has one head assembly that is furiously going back and forth to satisfy both processes that are running.

Hope all this helps.

[bobc622]

Thank you all for replying to this question in a way that I could understand. These forums are great.