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Layzed
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Need a Quick answer.

hi,

my question is does VM workstation, Virtual Machine affect my primary computer? i Got a vista X86 and like to install a 32Bit XP on the virtual machine, now my question is, does the virtual machine affect the speed on my vista? like i got 7372 MB of ram on my vista and i like to allow 1024MB to my Virtual machine does it take away 1024MB of ram on my primary computer and add's it to the virtual machine?

thanks for your time

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Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: Depends on your definition of "uninstall". If a virtual machine is NOT powered on (meaning it is suspended or powered off... or even paused), then it will not consume your host's memory.

So if by "uninstall" you mean "the virtual machine is not running right now", then yes, the virtual machine will not use memory when uninstalled. (It is up to the host operating system to manage the memory used by the virtual machine, so some of the semantics may differ, but the virtual machine isn't active anymore, so those memory pages are certainly available for use by other applications).

If by "uninstall" you mean "I uninstall VMware Workstation" or "I delete the virtual machine files from disk", then your question changes. The memory usage of a virtual machine is defined as I explained above. The VMware Workstation application does consume memory when it is running, and it also installs other applications that consume memory when they are running, so if you uninstall those then you will have more available memory on your host. However, that has nothing to do with virtual machines. A virtual machine is just a description that, when executed, gets interpreted into the execution of a physical machine in software. The "description" of that virtual machine is just a bunch of files. The only thing that those files take up are disk space. Delete those and you get that disk space back, but deleting them doesn't help you get more memory.

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oreeh
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It will allocate 1024MB + xMB.

So your host will have less memory to use.

Layzed
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Does the memory come back once you uninstall the virtual Machine?

Thanks

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Layzed
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still need an answer please Smiley Happy.

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admin
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Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: Depends on your definition of "uninstall". If a virtual machine is NOT powered on (meaning it is suspended or powered off... or even paused), then it will not consume your host's memory.

So if by "uninstall" you mean "the virtual machine is not running right now", then yes, the virtual machine will not use memory when uninstalled. (It is up to the host operating system to manage the memory used by the virtual machine, so some of the semantics may differ, but the virtual machine isn't active anymore, so those memory pages are certainly available for use by other applications).

If by "uninstall" you mean "I uninstall VMware Workstation" or "I delete the virtual machine files from disk", then your question changes. The memory usage of a virtual machine is defined as I explained above. The VMware Workstation application does consume memory when it is running, and it also installs other applications that consume memory when they are running, so if you uninstall those then you will have more available memory on your host. However, that has nothing to do with virtual machines. A virtual machine is just a description that, when executed, gets interpreted into the execution of a physical machine in software. The "description" of that virtual machine is just a bunch of files. The only thing that those files take up are disk space. Delete those and you get that disk space back, but deleting them doesn't help you get more memory.

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