I am having a hard time finding an appropriate word to describe this behavior. So apologies if this has been asked before, but I couldn't find anything in my searches.
My host OSX UI will occasionally seize up for input while I'm running Windows 7 Professional under Fusion. The most noticeable issue is that I'll be typing text, and letters will stop appearing on the screen for a brief instant. And then the characters I've queued up will start flowing. This only happens when I'm running the guest OS under fusion. If I shut fusion down, it doesn't happen.
In case it's not clear, here's a sequence that describes it.
- I'll start typing text (MS Word, Outlook, browser window...doesn't matter.). Like this: "The quick brown fox jumps"
- My cursor stops advancing, and I continue to type "over the lazy dog" but nothing appears on screen.
- At this point I'm usually caught off guard by this behavior so I stop typing. Then, after a second or so, "over the lazy dog" will get typed out on the screen in quick succession
I'll usually try to reproduce the issue by typing a lot of characters but it will be several minutes or even hours before I see the behavior again. From what I can tell, the display or OS isn't actually "seizing up". Things continue to happen on the screen. It just stops typing out my characters.
On a given day, I have several Safari browser tabs, iMail, Outlook 2011, Skype, iChat, spottily, eclipse, evernote, cisco vpn client and cornerstone open on the host os. On the windows box, I a small number of applications running (I only use it for development of .NET applications, so I run Visual Studio 2010 pretty much all the time, as well as Fiddler, powershell and maybe one Chrome window.) I have 1.50 GB (out of 2047MB total) memory used in the VM; processor is 0%.
I am happy with the performance of windows in the VM, just not with the impact it is having on my host OS.
Here is my configuration:
iMac 2103
Processor 3.1 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 1024 MB
Software OS X 10.9 (13A603)
Hard drive: 1TB fusion drive
VMWare Fusion 6.0.2 (I had this problem in Fusion 4 as well).
- Windows 7 Professional 64 bit
- 2048 MB ram allocated (recommended setting)
- 2 processor cores
- Image is about 200GB in size at the moment
I typically run VMWare fusion full screen on a second external monitor.
-BC