VMplayer Runs Very, Very Slowly

If you have installed VMplayer but it seems almost dead, taking a very long time to do anything, it's because you don't have enough physical memory in your machine. Although it will run in a machine with 512MB of memory, it runs slowly because it is paging stuff back and forth to the hard drive. Add more RAM to bring the machine's memory up to at least 1GB and preferably more to solve this. When there is enough memory, VMplayer can emulate a machine running Windows XP or Windows Vista at an acceptable speed.

Note: VMplayer is free software from VMware to let you run a pretend ("virtual") PC on your real PC. Like any other PC, you need to install Windows before it can be used, but once installed, you then have another machine. The screen, keyboard, and mouse are shared with your real machine. Why would you want a virtual PC? It's useful for testing out new software. Since you install the software on the virtual PC, the registry and hard drive of your real machine are not affected at all. Some software pollutes your system with crap that stays even after the software has been uninstalled. Running that software on a virtual PC means your own system remains clean. And if you have problems with the virtual PC, you can simply erase it and start again.