vmWare & Parallels rely heavily on the hard drive to run Windows (XP or Vista) on your mac. So the only way to make it run faster is to put it on a very fast hard drive … well, here’s my brilliant idea – convert portion of your memory into a fastest hard drive on the planet! 
. Here’s what, you’ll need:
- Ram Disk Utility Pro … old but forgotten concept of converting your spare memory into a super fast “hard drive”. ($14.99 is well worth of what you get)
- at least 2GB of memory on your apple (iMac, macbook, etc) is recommended
- a very small installation of Windows XP – with TinyXP (bittorrent link) that’s only 400gb! & vmWare / Parallels
How to: once you have Ram Disk installed, it will show up just as if it was a regular hard drive on your desktop. so all you’ll need to do – is to move the vmWare image of your Win XP to it & then re-setup new Virtual Machine (advanced options / “use the existing virtual disk”).
other suggested usage for ram hard drive:
- have 100mb + photo u want to manipulate in photoshop?
- u can even drop applications on it to speed them up (i found firefox to load images much faster … u figure out what kind of websites i was checking out 
- seriously great way to speed up anything on your mac that is hard drive recources hungry
Filed under: best utilities, how to, mac os
Nice ideas.
If the copy-to-ramdrive, copy-off-ramdrive process could be automated with the vm opening and closing this would be a healthy way to utilise the many Gigabytes of system memory on modern Macs that xp 32-bit can’t address. Maybe this is an idea for vmware to develop – with the caveat that you buy a UPS