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I have a VMWare virtual machine (windows xp). I have just started it up through the VMWare player and it's extremely slow on my laptop (expected).

Is it possible to boot from that image like in mac bootcamp so that it's not virtualised and soo slow?

Thank you

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  • Check the amount of memory/ram allocated for the VM. For XP, you want at least 1 GB allocated, but it will impact the host OS too.
    – OMG Ponies
    Jun 2, 2010 at 20:58

2 Answers 2

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No, because the hardware the virtual machine is running on is the VMWare app itself. You cannot boot into your virtual machine using your computer's physical hardware. It is possible to have two or more operating systems running side by side with another Windows install. Google about how to set up a "dual boot" system.

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  • Thanks for this. How does the bootcamp work though? I remember with my old mac I could use windows as a virtual machine, but I could also start up laptop in windows (same windows as I used within the virtual machine).
    – vikp
    Jun 2, 2010 at 21:17
  • I had no idea you could do that with bootcamp, but I don't use a mac. But there is a method which gets a little hairy, but you can try: I haven't done extensive research, but you might try looking into what's called "raw disk access." Namely, the virtual machine, instead of accessing a virtual machine, accesses the hard disk partition with the Windows install instead. When I last looked into it awhile ago, it involved creating a "hardware profile" in Windows for the laptop and for the software. You might look into that. Sorry I couldn't be more help.
    – DavidR
    Jun 2, 2010 at 21:49
  • No worries, thank for the help. I'm going to install ubuntu linux and hopefully i'll get a bit more out of my processor. Will run the virtual machine of the HDD rather than external disk. Fingers crossed it'll all work better.
    – vikp
    Jun 2, 2010 at 22:33
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Quite often the speed of Virtual Machines is heavily constrained by disk speed, as well as by available RAM. This probably isn't an option on a laptop, but on a desktop system you might find that running the VM from a second disk may give you much better performance. If you're running Windows 7 then there's also the option of booting directly from a virtual machine image.

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  • thanks for the link, found it very useful. Pity it works for Windows 7 only, my development machine is win xp pro... might have to move development to win 7, but that's the whole new story :(
    – vikp
    Jun 2, 2010 at 21:21

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