[chrisutley]

I've got 768MB of RAM in my Albook 15" 1GHz. I run VPC 6 with XP Pro. I'm wondering what throwing more RAM at VPC will do. Say I put another GB of RAM in this thing and allocated 768MB of physical RAM to VPC, will I see a significant performance increase?

[wataru]

That depends on what you're doing in VPC. If it's RAM-dependent, then yes, you could see a big increase in speed. But if all you're doing is playing Solitaire, then I don't think it will help.

One thing that's important to note is that giving VPC too much of your physical RAM is bad--you'll get lots of pageouts and your machine will get very slow. How much do you give it? You have 768MB of physical RAM; I'd try giving it no more than half.

[bmhome1]

Allocating more than 256 RAM to VPC is little benefit. Get more RAM to run OSX without ANY page-outs during VPC sessions, 512MB minimum, more the better. Also, closing all other OSX running applications helps, the idea is to give OSX as much resources to run VPC as possible. Also, the smaller the drive image, the faster it will run. Avoid installing unnecessary apps, Windows Acrobat Reader installed will destroy XP's speed, for example. Turn off all animation effects in Control Panel, select Classic theme, Classic window display. The more you can make XP look and act like Win95 the faster it will run.

[malvolio]

^ ^ ^
Excellent advice.
BTW, "all other OS X running applications" includes the Finder.
Oh yeah, and turn off sound in VPC.

[Sven G]

Also, it could help to turn off the XP system recovery feature: if you regularly back up your drive image, or use the undoable drives feature, it's useless anyway.