Poor performance in VMWare Workstation 10 Guest VM, Windows Experience Index score on Memory is low

[sockscap01]

Host spec is AMD A10-5800 CPU & 8GB DDR3-1600 RAM(dual-channel), running VMware workstation 10 on Windows 7 SP1 Ultimate 64-bit. WEI (Windows Experience Index) score on Memory is 7.3.

Guest is running Windows 7 SP1 Professional 32-bit. VMware tool has been installed. The WEI score on memory is only 4.5. I can feel the lag when working in the guest, because of the poor RAM performance issue.

Any way to optimize the guest performance?

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the Community - Remember the performance of the VM will always be less than that of the host machine - is there any thing running on the host besides the workstation and the VM?

[admin · Accepted solution]

Can I assume the guest has more than 960MB and less than 1.5GB of memory?  The highest possible memory subscore with less than 1.5GB of memory is 4.5.

[admin]

To maximize your WEI memory subscore, assign the guest 4GB of memory and (since your guest is 32-bit) enable PAE with:

bcdedit /set [{current}] pae ForceEnable

[sockscap01]

awesome! yes, I assigned 1.5GB RAM to the guest. I never thought it's the RAM size issue.

I just increased the RAM to 1.75 GB, and got 5.5 subscore on memory immediately.

as I only have over 7GB RAM usable on host (due to integrated GPU), 4GB RAM for a VM is a little luxurious, but I will test how much RAM provide a good balance. Thanks again for the suggestion.