I’ve had to do a lot of work on my Windows 7 virtual machine recently, with my Linux virtual machine running at the same time. It was… painful. Even starting up the Win7 VM while the Linux VM was running meant twenty minutes or more of an essentially unusable machine. Starting up the Win7 VM, then the Linux VM, was a lot faster. But I couldn’t always abandon whatever I was doing in the Linux VM just to shut it down for a few minutes so I could start up Windows.
Installing the beta version of Ubuntu 10.04 (“Lucid Lynx”) a few days ago helped a lot. I’m not sure whether it’s just noticeably better than the 9.10 version, or whether my 9.10 installation was damaged somehow, but it was eating up quite a bit of CPU power even when no applications were running. If it were a Windows machine, I’d suspect malware; as it is, I don’t know what the problem could have been. In any case, upgrading seems to have fixed it.
However, that only made working with both VMs open slightly less painful, so yesterday I went looking for a solution. And lo and behold, I found one! The 8GB upgrade for my MacBook Pro, which I’ve talked about before, had finally dropped to what I consider an almost reasonable price, so I ordered it. It will probably be here late next week, maybe sooner.
With that in place, my work should proceed a lot more smoothly. Eagerly awaiting its arrival!
congrats on the upgrade. Soon it will have the specs of a present-day PC. ;->
The vast majority of the computers I see for sale — online or at local stores — still have between 2GB and 4GB of memory. Anything more is rare, most especially on notebook computers. :-p
According to the tracking page, it left a city that’s three hours away from here at 11:01pm tonight, and should be delivered tomorrow morning sometime. 😀
I use something called the Delivery Status dashboard app from JuneCloud: http://junecloud.com/software/mac/delivery-status.html
It saves me trips to a tracking website, and on top of that has an iPhone/iPod Touch app that syncs to its information available (or, if you like torture, you can type in the tracking data into your iPhoneOS device by hand) if you want to track things on your iPod Touch away from home. I don’t use that, but I like to use the dashboard app, it automatically updates, and keeps me from obsessively checking the website. 🙂
Thanks, but Newegg’s tracking page is pretty awesome, and I don’t have an obsessive need to know exactly when a new location has been reached — other than when it’s delivered here, and no tracking page can tell that until well after the event.
Speaking of the event, it arrived this morning, as promised. And the machine runs AWESOME with it installed… I’ve doubled the virtual machine sizes, and can run things in both virtual machines plus OS X simultaneously, without much more than an occasional stutter. 🙂 I guess before it was swapping a lot. Though I don’t know why, even with a 2GB VM and a 1.5GB one, it’s using less than 5GB of memory. With only a 1GB Win7 VM and a 768MB Linux VM, it should have had enough memory to work with without doing any swapping.