Computers

VMWare Workstation Performance Settings

KyleCaulfield 2 Comments

If you are hosting large performance intensive virtual machines in Windows 7 / Vista you will start to notice even if you allocate a large amount of memory to the virtual machine windows will not use it and will even start having paging issues trying to clean up memory used by the machine.  Below are settings for VMWare Workstation’s config.ini.  These settings are global so just make them once and they will effect every VM that you have.  What these settings are doing is telling windows to allocate the memory at boot time and not to dispose when the vm is not using it.  I noticed my VMs speed increase dramatically after these settings were changed.

prefvmx.useRecommendedLockedMemSize = “true”

prefvmx.minVmMemPct = “100”

mainmem.useNamedFile = “false”

bios.bootdelay = “5000”

 

The config.ini file is commonly located in: C:Documents and SettingsAll UsersApplication DataVMWareVMware Workstation

vmx86.sys bluescreen when starting VMWare Virtual Machines

KyleCaulfield 2 Comments

Running Windows 7 64 bit a common VMWare (and many other programs) problem is that a driver will cause a Blue Screen of Death, or BSOD. An easy way to allow these drivers to run and have windows ignore the issues is by disabling “Driver Verifier” in windows 7. These is a quick and easy way to try to solve your problems with your .sys drivers.

  1. Hit windows key + r to bring up the run window and type “verifier” without quotes.  Click OK.
  2. Choose “Delete existing settings and click “Finish.”
  3. Restart your computer

Hopefully this will help with your BSOD problems.  If you are having such bad problems you can not even get into windows before your BSOD, try this same method using Safe Mode.  Let me know in the comments if this worked for any of you!