Windows 7 32 bit or 64 bit on VmWare 5.02?

[gosox13]

I recently upgraded to VM 5.02 professional. I have been running a virtual machine using Win XP Home Ed with SP3 (32 bit)  for several years and the vm lately has been causing my iMac to run very sluggishly unless I suspend it. It may be because I only have 4.64G left of the 50G space I originally allocated to the vm when I created it. I decided rather than trying to eliminate more programs to gain space for the XP, I would just move the vm to my 2T external drive (which I use for Time Machine backups of my Mac, and has lots of space left) and would create a new vm on the Mac using Windows 7, and allocating more hard drive space to it than I did to the XP. I assume that if I move the XP vm to the external drive, it will free up the 50G allocated to it, and I will still be able to access the files on it if I need to after I move it to the external drive. My question, assuming this makes sense, is should I get Windows 7 32 bit or 64 bit for the new vm operating system? My Mac's hard drive still has 350G of it's 750G capacity available right now. Here are my specs:

  Model Name:     iMac (OS X vers. 10.6.8)

  Model Identifier:     iMac7,1

  Processor Name:     Intel Core 2 Duo

  Processor Speed:     2.4 GHz

  Number Of Processors:     1

  Total Number Of Cores:     2

  L2 Cache:     4 MB

  Memory:     2 GB

  Bus Speed:     800 MHz

  Boot ROM Version:     IM71.007A.B03

  SMC Version (system):     1.21f4

Do I need more memory in my Mac to make 64 bit worthwhile? If so, is it worth upgrading or should I just get 32 bit? Does my plan make sense? I have been reading several forums and am a little confused. Please don't get too technical if possible. Thanks

[pbrunnen]

Hi Gosox13,

   First off for your question...  you only have 2GB of ram in your system...  If you want to run Win7 (either 64 or 32 bit) with any decent speed you will want to upgrade to at least 4GB which I believe is the max for your system.

  Windows 7 likes to have 2GB just for itself.   Mac OS 10.6 will want at least access to 1GB, which leaves you with two choices... Give 2GB to the VM and your Mac side will struggle and beachball by constatntly struggling with caching... or give the VM only 1GB and watch Win7 crawl.

  Keep in mind that whenever you are doing a lot of caching, your disk speed (esp. spindle speed) is very important.  I belive the machine you have is a 5400 RPM drive.  This will make caching EXTREMELY painful...  and your disk will be your biggest bottleneck.

  Using an external drive for your VM... keep in mind that this too will add a bottleneck.  USB drives are going to be a bad choice for running a VM off of.  Firewire is probably a best bet on that age manchine.   Keep in mind that if you bump out the connection while your VM is running and you risk the chance of loosing the entire VM.  Keep at least one good snapshot if you are prone to accidently disconnecting your external drive.

  My last though on 32 vs. 64 bit...  Unless you have any special software reason for it, don't bother going out of your way to run 32 bit software.  You will just run into incompatibilites as the software world continues its march from 32bit apps to 64bit ones.

Hope that helps...

  - Cheers, Peter.

[gosox13]

Thanks Peter, that is extremely helpful. You are correct that I can only upgrade to 4MG. Based on your reply, it sounds like I am somewhat limited and my best alternative is to upgrade my memory and stay away from Windows 7 because I won't have adequate resources. So I should probably create a new XP vm (needs less memory?), transfer important files I want to keep, then delete the old XP vitual machine. And I shouldn't use the external disk for the vm location.

Is that what makes the most sense without replacing my Mac?

[avanish321]

I beg to differ on that...

Windows 32 bit version requires less memory than 64 bit. Hence i wud suggest you to go for 32 bit version of windows 7 rather than going to windows xp which is outdated.

Allocate 1.5 gb for windows 7 vm and you will not have performance issue . Of course you must upgrade ur ram on mac to at least 4 gb.

[ColoradoMarmot]

XP definitely needs less memory, however it goes out of support shortly, so you won't be able to get any security patches.

32 vs 64 bit makes no significant difference in the memory footprint or performance.

Upgrading to 4GB of RAM should let you run Windows 7 OK, but only on 10.6 or 10.7, and without much else running on the host.  With 10.8, you really want at least 8GB in the machine for decent performance.  Keep in mind that 10.6 is no longer supported by Apple.

[gosox13]

My iMac (2007 model) can only be upgraded to 4GB memory max--I just ordered the 2x2 upgrade chips. My OS X is 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard, upgraded from original Leopard). Fusion has been upgraded several times to 5.02 presently.

According to Microsoft, Win 7 64 bit requires 2GB, and 32 bit requires 1GB. So if I create a new vm with Win 7 after I upgrade my memory, I would purchase the 32 bit version and allocate 1 or 1.5GB of RAM to the vm (as has been previously suggested above). Does this plan make sense? Or should I just re-format my existing XP vm and start clean with it? It ran fine the first few years after I installed it without slowing up my Mac host, but since the vm now has used up 45Mg of the 50 hard disk space I originally partitioned to it, both the vm and the host run much slower than they used to.  The host runs faster if I suspend the vm, so the vm is clearly causing or contributing to the speed problem (spinning balls and hour glasses).

I checked the RAM allocated to my XP vm, and it is only 512k, which has never been changed since my original installation of Fusion and the XP vm.

Would increasing the RAM allocated to the XP vm to 1GB help solve my problem? Or should I pursue one of the other alternatives described above (re-formatting the XP vm or deleting it and installing a new vm with Win 7 32)? I don't think I can easily increase the partitioned space to the old vm (after researching this alternative in the forum--beyond my comfort zone) if that may be causing my problem, but I believe I can allocate more space if I set up a new vm.

Obviously, I don't have sufficient technical knowledge to figure out what is causing my problem and determing the best solution. That is why I am looking to this forum for help. Please try to keep it simple.

Thanks.

[ColoradoMarmot]

The challenge with 32-bit windows 7, is that there is a *lot* of 64-bit only software out there these days, so you may be just postponing issues.

If you're still using the original HD in that machine, you might check out Smart Utility from Voltain's software and make sure it's not starting to fail (which can also cause some of those symptoms).

I suspect that you're starving the host for RAM, so the first thing I'd do is see if the memory upgrade solves the problem.  If it does, then you could just leave everything else alone.

What are you using the VM for?  That'll help figure out the best path.

[gosox13]

Thanks for responding.

I don't think it is a hard drive problem since the Mac runs fine when I suspend the vm. I use the XP vm to run Windows specific software that I used on my previous PC, such as Quicken and Microsoft Office suite, and others. I know that some XP programs are not compatible with Win 7 unless I get Win 7 Professional, which is available in both 32 bit and 64 bit.

I received the memory chips for the upgrade and hope to have time in the next few days to install them. Hopefully I'll notice an improvement by doubling my memory. I could then increase the memory allocated to my XP vm from 512k to 1GB, and still have 3 GB for the Mac.

Question--when you suspend the vm, does the full memory you allocated to it then become available to the host?

[ColoradoMarmot]

Yep, it's released.

If XP doesn't connect to the internet, then you're probably best off just running that.

[gosox13]

I do need XP to connect to the internet for a number of the programs I run on it (Outlook, Quicken, etc). I upgraded the computer's RAM from 2GB to 4GB (my max) over the weekend and moved some large photo files from the XP to my external drive to free up about 10GB of space on the vm, and both the host and vm now appear to be running much better. So I am going to give it another week or so before I consider doing anything else. Hopefully I won't have to. It appears to have been just a problem of insufficient resources, not corruption of the XP.

Thanks for your help.