Vista - Vista Optimising in VMware

Ok, here goes the story.

I’m running Ultimate 64bit on the following spec;

• 2.4ghz quad
• 4gb RAM
• ASUS P5E MOBO
• ATI HD3870 card

I work as an Applications Developer and I have a development environment set up in a virtual machine running Ultimate 32bit. You may ask why i have things set up this way?... well VPN (which i use a lot) is not supported in a 64bit flavour and the same can be said about Visual Studio 2008 & SQL Server.
Anyway, getting to the point, the Virtual Machine running Vista32bit has a RAM allocation of 1 gig but there is a lot of memory swapping going on between the VM and the host OS to the point of a system freeze until i can kill a process or two the free up memory. So what i want to do is strip everything out of the guest OS that uses unnessecary memory ie fancy looking desktop etc.
Can someone give me some pointers?

Thanks J

Well, first problem I see is that you only allocated 1G to the VM. What I would do, is get some more memory in the system, 8G (hell memory is cheap now) and allocate at LEAST 2G to the VM, preferably 4G.

Just my opinion, but I run Vmware on Ultimate64 also, and I use the setup I described, although I am not a app developer.

My best recommendation is use XP as your guest OS.

Why?

First is the memory issue. XP will be plenty happy with a gig (or less) of memory. In my experience, the minimum for Vista is 1.5gigs, and certainly more if you're going to put it to any serious use.

Second is the harddisk use. Vista has all these supercache and such going on, and even without them enabled, it just generally seems to chew at your hard disk more often than XP did. Problem for you is that you're probably using a single hard disk for both the host and the guest OS's. They're both wanting to chew at that hard disk. Slows things down.


However, if you're dead set on running Vista x86 as the guest...
1. Disable sidebar.
2. Disable themes (not just reset the theme to classic, but actually turn off the Themes & DWM services.)
3. Disable the supercache service.
4. Disable system restore. (just make copies of the VM files on your host every now and again.)
5. Disable fancy mouse effects, system sounds, wallpaper, etc etc.

Thanks guy's for your advice, i was thinking of swapping back to XP just as a dev environment but wanted to see if i could do it with vista.

Thanks Again

Doo

this is sort of off topic but I might as well share this-- as far as I can tell, VMware seems to disable system restore for me. I wasn't able to use it except in safe mode after installing vmware, and apparently there are a few other programs, mostly the ones that install their own network adapters alongside your own, that also disable system restore. The error that will come up is that system restore is already running, but no matter what you do, ie kill process/restart etc, nothing changes.

Anyway, had to use safe mode to do a system restore. Did anyone else with vmware have this problem?