Could a hardware upgrade improve vmware on a PC-CHIP Celeron 1.7 ?

For any virtual PC application it is imperitive to have more RAM... I would upgrade to 512MB ram first and see how that goes for you... remember it is loading each virtual Os into memory..

Also, after vmware and related OS are installed, run a defrag.. alot of large cache files for VMware since you didn't have alot of RAM.

Good luck,

fE

I agree with the above, but its also reliant on what you select in the options of the Virtual OS, if you only set it to use 64mb when in use then its going to be slow, remember to increase the ram the Virtual OS is allowed to use to increase its performance.


Jim

I would definetely say that for the price of RAM, go up to 512 or even 768.  Then you may want to consider just a standard AGP or PCI video card (you don't need a massive one) that will get your video off of your system memory.

You might want to use a PIC NIC instead of the onboard one.  I've experience lag on my workstation during heavy load on my CPU.

graphics upgrade would not help much...
as suggested above...ram upgrade would help...

but imho...cpu is the bottleneck here..celeron has lesser cache...when you add more memory in the system, celeron cache will not be best to manage it.
in case of vmware, its the cpu that does most of the work of isolating the multiple operating systems, and converting the virtual os calls to actual cpu calls...
this means that the cpu should work more and also manage memory more faster than a normal system would require.

hence i would suggest a cpu upgrade if possible...

I agree with the above. Both Vmware and Virtual PC are memory hogs. Get as much memory you can. Upgrading to a P4 would help too. As kiranghag has pointed out, virtual OSs are labor intensive on a CPU. I noticed a signifigant increase in CPU temp (46 deg compared to 31 deg idle) when running Virtual PC.

The only reason I suggested a video card upgrade isn't for a higher performance video card, but rather for freeing up the 32mb of memory that is wasted on the video...you really don't need a great video card at all...you may even want to see about changing the BIOS settings to only allocate 8-16mb of memory to your video card.

Fair suggestion Rustyrpage about the video card. However it would be cheaper to buy another stick of RAM than get a new video card.

BUT if you have already maxxed out your memory slots - or if you happen to have a spare video card laying around, then it is definitely a good idea.

You can get a 16mb video card for about 15-20 bucks.

Currently I have a amd xp2400 (2GHz) with ati 9200se an 512 MB ram dual 80gigs and still vmware chugs right along, sure it works fine but its still quite slow, might just be my thought but if you want it to work well get a really beefy machine, ok...

i got a new DELL desktop recently...pentium IV-2.8 GHz, 1GB RAM, onboard video, 80GB IDE with Win XP loaded...

after using it, i found that rustyrpage has a small but imp point..

whenever the virtual machine is on, windows performance is little degraded...especially when Windows paints the window-animations. cpu utilisation is little okay (20-40%)as compared to previous one (60-70%). apart from that, there is no "visible" lag

so i guess video cards with shared memory should be replaced with the one using seperate memory...or need to turn off animations...

LL6 Have you set the memory allocation correctly on your VM?
If you have 512MB of RAM I would suggest running upto a maximum of 256MB for the VM.
If you assign too much memory to the VM then your real machine won't function very well at all - especially if it's running XP. You should keep at least 256MB for your system.
Ideally you should add an extra 512MB stick and split the memory. 512 for the VM and 512 for your real system. Or up to around 700 for your VM would be good, it just depends what you are using more.

Your xp2400 is more than enough to run one VM.


Kiranghag==>whenever the virtual machine is on, windows performance is little degraded...

Again, how are you dividing your memory between the VM and your real system? With a gig of RAM and the right configuration you should have no issues at all.

Of course I'm not saying that onboard video is good enough for everything these days, but it should still be a functional and workable option.

I would like points please :)

Thankyou :)

You are all right!, the best thing you can do for increasing the performance of vmware is to increase de RAM. If you can afford to have 1Gb of DDR RAM that would be great.

But, by using a better CPU (not Celeron like me) you will see a really great increase in performance limited only by the RAM.

So we have performance on RAM limited by CPU and performance on CPU limited by RAM. Let us be fair with both and everything will go fine.

I've also noticed (like mentioned earlier) that motherboards that have an integrated Video Card (always shared memory) like mine suffer for lower performance, but it depends of the quality (brand) of your motherboard. An AGP Video Card like ATI or NVidia or similar (not shared) could fix this.

Integrated motherboards "may" also suffer for lower performance by applying Services Packs, Motherboard Drivers, Software, etc. Better to catch the software problem earlier and try to have a clean OS on this kind of motherboards.

Thanks to all and bye.