# Some Programs run slowly or not at all on VMWare



## Rhino_Man (Feb 2, 2009)

ok so here's the deal. I got a previous generation Macbook Pro (prior to the current generation but not old old generation, it was brand brand new when I bought it 3 months ago) and I'm having trouble with running some programs in windows.

I have windows installed in a boot camp partition which DOES in fact run smooth as hell, HOWEVER I would like to be able to use VMWare Fusion to access the bootcamp partion to run a number of programs for both school and entertainment, but it doesn't seem to want to let me for some of them.

For school, I have been having an incredably tough time getting Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to run without it eating my mouse input and making me loose control of the VM. It doesn't work on Mac OS for obvious reasons.

for entertainment I have been trying to get Ragnarok Online to run (as it only comes in EXE format and will not run on mac os), yet whenever I run the game (and it SHOULD run perfectly fine) the game lags horribly and the mouse movement is choppy and very slow. It seems to alleviate somewhat when I run it in windowed mode inside of vmware while vmware is running with full intigration on but the problem is still there.

Now I could easily restart into bootcamp but that defeats the purpose of having the VMware installed on the computer. Is there anything that I might be doing wrong with it?

oh right, I suppose I should say: I'm running Mac OS X Leapard, VMware Fusion V2.0.1, and it's running WinXP pro SP3.

I'm no dunce, I already checked hard drive, so it's not that (it's got 40 gigs free), I checked it's RAM, I gave it everywhere between 1.5 gigs and 3.5 gigs, none of it actually made a difference, and I tried downgrading to an older version of VMware, it didn't run anything with 3D at all (as it DirectX wasn't supported prior to VMware Fusion 2.0.0).

Help!


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## sinclair_tm (Mar 11, 2005)

REmember, VMFusion is a virtual PC, and as such, is making software based hardware, so things that require higher hardware requirements will not work as well in the software PC. What are the hardware requirements of the softwares that you are trying to run? And what hardware is the vm showing to the guest OS?


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## Rhino_Man (Feb 2, 2009)

VMWare is currently set to use both processors on my mac, 2 gigs of ram (I found more then that to not be beneficial as it made leapard run slowly), 100 gig bootcamp hard drive (with ~40 gigs left), full 3d support enabled, bridge as much as possible.

I'm trying to run Ragnarok Online primarily, but I also need to get it to run Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 for school. Also, my mouse dissappears in Bioshock on the VMWare but I suspect that's a different problem since there's no lag for that game.


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## shuuhen (Sep 4, 2004)

I use VMware Fusion 2.0 with Windows XP Pro (SP2 though). Like you, I am accessing a partition created for Boot Camp. However, I only allocated 1 GB of RAM and one processor core to the VM. Visual Studio 2008 runs fine for me (although I hardly touch Windows for programming on my personal machine). I haven't really done gaming with VMware (barely have the time for Doom 3 and Neverwinter Nights on my Linux machine), so I can't really say how well that works out.

How much RAM is in the MBP? I'd make sure at least 512 MB is left for Mac OS X, maybe even 1024 MB. If it's just the stock 2 GB, I'd say try 1024 MB RAM for the virtual machine and only let it have a single core of your processor.


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## Rhino_Man (Feb 2, 2009)

well er, it WAS stock 2 gig but I had it upgraded to 4 gigs, I have it currently set to take half of that, if I take any more I start to notice slowdown in the mac OS side which I believe still needs to run if I'm using VMWare.

I just ran a chkdsk on the bootcamp partition (from VMWare) and it turned up some errors. It still ran into the same issue with the mouse not moving smoothly, when I started up Ragnarok Online. lag appears to be greatly reduced but it's probably something unrelated (like the network I'm on).

Visual Studio ran, but ate my RAM. I think Leapard actually reported some slowdown during that period too (I have the processor report showing on OS X while all this is running and it's showing some hefty activity while Windows is idling.


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