VMWare Fusion Install Question: How Much Space to Allocate for XP?

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Hi all. Just bought Fusion and plan on installing tonight. Looks pretty easy, but the one thing I'm not so sure about is how much space I'll need to allocate for Windows XP (Home Edition). I think the default is 20GB, but.. is that too much? What will I be using it for? Not much, actually.. but enough that it's important to me. I'll want to run IE 7 as there are some sites I can't access on the Mac. There are a couple of apps I'll download (FastStone Image Viewer, PalTalk for chat) and ... that's about it. All my video and image editing is done on Mac with Final Cut and Pixelmator. I don't play games. I think the PalTalk chat application is probably the only thing I can think of that might take up some memory .. but not much. What do you think? 2GB? 8GB? Leave it at 20GB?

Thanks..
 
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i wouldnt go much smaller than 15gb. when i had xp on my mac 8 gb were taken up between win xp (professional), office (full version) and about .4 gb of other small apps.
 
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Ok.. I set it to 20GB (the default). I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that you can adjust it later on. I installed AVG (virus), FastStone (image viewer) and a chat app. If anyone else stumbles across this thread, a few quick questions:

1. I noticed that when I turned on my iSight in Windows, it didn't work in Mac anymore (I had to disconnect it); same goes for my portable drive (the icon disappeared in Leopard, but reappeared after disconnecting in Windows). Is there a way to use them both at the same time? Print from both at the same time? Also.. it said it was connected to my protable drive, but.. I couldn't find it anywhere in Windows (not in My Computer or Network Drives). If it found it, where did it go?
2. I put my Mac to "Sleep" each night. As far as Windows.. should I "Suspend", "Shut Down" or .. just leave running when I go to bed? Does Sleep in Leopard take care of both or .. is it a bad idea to have Windows running when I'm not using it? I doubt I'll use it much, but.. just curious.
 
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1. This is a common issue with VMWare. OS X and Windows "fight" for the USB devices.

2. I always suspend until Windows starts running slow, then I do a shutdown and restart just as if I were on Windows not running in VMWare. And I usually turn off VMWare when I don't need Windows. It usually slows my Mac down with just 1GB of ram.

Also, in the future you can add another Windows partition in VMWare if the 20GB gets full. But I don't think you can extend the 20GB to say 30GB, I think you have to do it by adding a new 10GB (or whatever) partition in VMWare.
 

cwa107


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Ok.. I set it to 20GB (the default). I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that you can adjust it later on.

Actually, it will adjust itself - one of the nice things about running in a VM is that the virtual hard disk can adjust dynamically to comply with demand.
 
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I used VirtualBox and with XP Pro, anti virus, and a couple of apps I only used 3.6gb of the 8gb I setup for my virtual machine. I works fine for me.
 
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wait wait wait, so i set mine to 5G (im an idiot, i know) and i have 300MB free now, if i were to install a game that took up 4 gigs or something on the virtual drive it would be just fine provided i had like 10 gigs of space on my actual hard drive???
 

cwa107


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wait wait wait, so i set mine to 5G (im an idiot, i know) and i have 300MB free now, if i were to install a game that took up 4 gigs or something on the virtual drive it would be just fine provided i had like 10 gigs of space on my actual hard drive???

It should, providing that you set the virtual hdd to dynamic.
 

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