VM is overtaxing my HOST's RAM.

[The VCR King]

I have a Virtual Machine of Windows XP on my gaming PC and I have it's virtual RAM limited to 2GB. I use this VM to run retro PC games that are too old for my 64-bit Windows 7 to run. However, when this VM is running my gaming PC's 8GB of RAM fills to almost 80% and then everything runs slow. Should I decrease the RAM allowance to the VM or add more physical RAM to my actual PC?

 

[beers]

Probably both.

 

[voyagerfan99]

Something else is wrong then. because if you allocate 2GB of RAM, it's not going to use more than 2GB.

What are you using for virtualization software?

 

[beers]

Something else is wrong then.

You know he has billions of background processes that are consuming the current physical allocation of resources

 

[The VCR King]

Something else is wrong then. because if you allocate 2GB of RAM, it's not going to use more than 2GB.

What are you using for virtualization software?

VMware. With VMware closed and not running, my PC's RAM usage is about 3.5GB but with the VM running it shows from 6.33 to 6.5+ GB in use.

 

[voyagerfan99]

Sounds about right, because remember VMware itself is a program that also needs to use RAM. Remember that.

 

[The VCR King]

Sounds about right, because remember VMware itself is a program that also needs to use RAM. Remember that.

I'll decrease the VM's allowance to 1.5GB and see what happens.

 

[voyagerfan99]

then everything runs slow.

Define what this means. Because if you still have 20% of your RAM free nothing should be running slow.