VMWare startup time and flakiness

I don’t know why, but just recently VMWare has been performing rather badly for me. It used to start up to a saved session of Windows in a matter of seconds, but now takes minutes before I can start work. Selecting Unity mode takes another minute or so to get all set up.

Working on anything while VMWare is running is bad news - everything in the system slows down to a crawl, especially during the startup phase, but even whilst running. I used to be able to switch around with ease, and even though Inventor was sometimes a little laggy, it was quite responsive. Now, I need to wait seconds for every operation in Inventor to complete (which may be a Network licensing issue, since the same thing appears to be true of Windows machines on the network, too), and it affects my OS X software, too.

Finally, I had a crash today, where VMWare shut down. I think I’d saved all of my work, but I can’t be arsed waiting for it all to load up again to check. I’ve only got 20 mins to work on the stuff I need to use VMWare for, and I think I’ll just do something else instead of waiting for half of that for it to boot up.

I don’t know if it is an OS X issue, a VMWare installation issue, an Inventor issue or a VM image issue. I only need to keep using Inventor for a couple of weeks, and I have to use Access to write my last lot of school reports. After that, I may be able to remove VMWare and Parallels from my system entirely.

Actually, I think I’ll do a complete reinstall of OS X and all of my applications when I get Leopard. And perhaps I’ll have several partitions: OS, Applications and Data. That way I can have separate backups, that are restorable easily.