[lfe2211]

I did some searching on the forum but could not find specific answers to my questions.

I have a Macbook, 1.83Ghz, dual core processor, 2 Ghz of RAM, 200 MB 7400 RPM HD.

A trial version of VMWare Fusion 1.1 (VMWF) is running well with XP Pro//SP 2 in a virtual machine (VM).

Here are my questions.

1--Is there an optimal allocation of RAM for VMWF and Leopard?

2--Should I assign 2 cores to the XP Pro//SP2 VM?

Are the answers to the above 2 questions dependent on what I'm running in the VM? Is the answer just "Trial and Error"?

I run Office 2007 (lots of complex Excel and Access usage), JMP (SAS Stat program), Safari, Firefox, Roboform and Clipmate in the VM. No games. I do lots of charting, graphing and complex math calculations in Excel, Access and JMP.

Given these Apps, will VMWF, which can use 2 cores, be better suited to my needs than Parallells which uses only 1 core?

Thanks for any help.

[64stang06]

I have 2GB of RAM in my MacBook and allocate 768MB for XP, with both cores activated in Fusion. Seems to work for me, but again, it's more of a trial and error type thing as results may vary

[lfe2211]

In the MacTech article "Virtualization Benchmarking", the following statement was made:

VMware Fusion has the capability of creating a virtual machine with two virtual processors. Parallels does not have that capability. For most tasks, two virtual processors had no significant impact, and sometimes ran even slower than the single processor configuration. And, even though we didn't test it here, we would expect those applications that can take advantage of multiple processors to run more quickly in a two virtual processor environment.

Can anyone explain this part of the quote to me,

"For most tasks, two virtual processors had no significant impact, and sometimes ran even slower than the single processor configuration"

How can this be correct?

Thanks for any help.

[cgc]

Why would you allocate two cores when you only have two cores? What's left to run OS X? I allocate two cores on my MacPro and sometimes (rarely) see the OS (XP or a Linux distro) use more than one core. Stick to one core unless you know the application is optimized for multiple cores.