Streaming Video on Guest XP

[GeorgeBB]

I'm using VMWare Fusion on my MacBook Pro to run Windows XP as the guest OS. My performance test is to stream video from www.abc.com in full-screen mode at 1920 x 1200 resolution. The video plays flawlessly in Mac OS or XP as the base OS using bootcamp.

However, it is very, very choppy in XP as a Parallels guest OS, and a little choppy in XP as a VMWare guest. VMWare has the advantage of utilizing both cores of th Core 2 Duo processor, so I'm assuming that's why the video looks better under VMWare than Parallels. I had hoped, though, that using both processors would make the video as smooth under VMWare as it is under Mac OS.

My question: Is there anything I can tweak to increase the quality of video streaming in high-res? Do I just need to get more memory? (I currently have 2G with 1G devoted to the guest 0S.)

George

[admin]

When you're streaming this hi-res video, what is being maxed out - CPU, memory, network? If you temporarily set the max RAM on the host to 1 GB, does it still play smoothly? Have you tried quitting other applications?

[GeorgeBB]

I wasn't running any other applications. I think it would be a good test to boot XP from BootCamp and temporarily limit the max memory to 1G, but I don't know how. Any suggestions?

[admin]

I'm not sure how to do this in XP, but normally you can limit the RAM OS X sees via the maxmem boot arg[/url] - you could try it and see if this works under Windows as well.

Edit: If that doesn't work, you could always try physically pulling some RAM out. -etung 2007.07.31 11:58

[rwf3]

I have the same question. My VMware Windows XP shows 512 RAM, but my iMac has 4GB RAM physically installed. Is there someway of increasing the amount of RAM in my VMware machine to improve the video streaming?

[admin]

I doubt it's the same question. With the virtual machine shut down (suspended doesn't count), go to Settings > Memory and you should be able to adjust the allocation. Note that giving the guest too much RAM is bad since the host may not be left with enough.