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Mac Forum / Applications / Virtual PC / May 2006RAM on a Virtual PC: fiction or reality?
Good day, Running the latest updated Virtual PC for Mac edition on a Mac equipped with 512MB RAM, I noticed some strange behaviour of the operating systems installed. Both Windows XP Home Edition and Prof Edition with the latest SP's show in the System properties and Winver information that the available RAM is 256MB as I specified in the properties of the Virtual PC app. Windows 2000 shows 261. Only, the Help & Support tools General Information tool shows 64MB. Who isn't able to calculate here: the VPC App, Help & Support, or the Windows Device Drivers?, that's what one asks itself. A Windows Application that requires quite some memory installs (slowly) and seems to detect the 256MB. But after installation, the performance is comparable to a 64MB RAM performance. A solution as I experienced to speeden up the performance of the Virtual PC is creating a VPC Hard Disk and run it as a second hard drive, and set the Virtual Memory Paging File of Windows completely to this attached hard drive image. And use the maximum Virtual space available. Make the hard drive image of about 1 or 2 GB and dynamically expanding. I haven't tried the fixed disk size images yet, that seems to tricky to me. All of this doesn't has to take that much hard disk space of the Mac. First Hard drive in Windows 10GB and second 1GB, that doesn't consume that much of your Mac Disk space. My question now is, finally, has anyone else experienced this calculating problem and have you been able to find a workabout?? Kind regards from a tropical Holland, Mario Get yourself a copy of MenuMeters. It's a freeware program that will, amongst other things, display the mount of free and committed memory in the menu bar of your Mac. From observing this, whilst running Windows XP in VPC, it seems clear that VPC does not simply grab all the real memory it is allocated. There is something more cleaver going on in the way VPC manages memory usage than simply taking over the complete amount of real physical memory in your Mac. Then again, memory management is a complex thing, maybe it is OSX which is swapping out some of that memory which VPC has allocated for itself. This makes sense, since VPC is itself just an application. I'd say putting the windows swap file on a second virtual drive sounds like a sensible tweak if it helps. Other than that, I'd be looking at CPU usage as well as memory usage to explain you performance issues. MenuMeters can help with that too. On 12/5/06 7:02 AM, in article C0897308.19D%mario.been@mac.com, "Mario Been" <mario.been@mac.com> wrote: > Good day, > [quoted text clipped - 33 lines] > > Mario |
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