I run several virtual machines with XP as the guest OS which seem to use about 1.7 GB per VM. I want to add a new VM with Windows 7 as the guest and am wondering how much RAM I need to assign to the Windows 7 VM to have it run well. I generally have only one Internet Explorer window in the VMs.

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6 Answers

I have run it usably with 1Gb but would recommend closer to 2 Gb. Running with 1Gb it sometimes starts to slow up. It all depends on what you're doing with the system.

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I have tried and run multiple operating systems using VMWARE. I would recommend 2GB Ram as any less, seems to make a bit of a difference to the running performance of the system.

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I'm recently configured win7 on Parallels desktop for internet surfing & MS office 2007 usage. I was able to allocate more than 1,5 Gb for vm after installing 3 Gb. I don't think that win7 is usable without at least 1,5Gb of RAM allocated to it ) Probably in case of VMWare you'll get same numbers.

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Depends on the host system.

On a Macbook Pro (Mac OSX 10.6.4) with 4GB RAM, I ended up allocating 1.2 GB of RAM, which was the sweet spot. Anything more it swapped, anything less it took a long time to boot.

On a Windows XP with 2 GB RAM, allocating 1 GB exactly gave good results.

This is, of course, minimal footprint. If you need to run memory intensive applications (Photoshop etc) on your Windows 7, you will increase the amount to at least 2 GB.

I see,I have tested windows 7 with 512, but it depends on how you would want to use windows 7, I would say 1GiG.

Hope this helps.

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I give it 3GB because I use Visual Studio.

I would say you only need 1G if you do web surfing or office writing only.

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