We're running Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit SP1 on Dell Precision T3500's (Xeon E5630 @ 2.53GHz, 4GB of RAM). On top of this is VMWare Workstation 7.1.4, up to date. Running in a VM is Windows XP Professional 32-bit SP3. VMWare is configured to allocate 2GB of RAM for the guest.
Performing nearly any operation inside the VM is very slow; even scrolling a text file can require seconds, with very obvious associated disk activity. A quick check of task manager and resource monitor from the Windows 7 host shows that VMWare is allocated a significant chunk of virtual memory, but I think it's all being paged out, and as soon as I start scrolling through the text file, I quickly hit something like 140 hard faults per second and stay there.
Older versions of VMWare on far more ancient hardware (Pentium 4-vintage) running a Windows XP host never exhibited these particular symptoms. Is there some way to make Windows 7 less aggressive about paging VMWare out of memory, or is there some solution that reduces the amount of paging to disk required? It's entirely possible I simply have something misconfigured, but I haven't fiddled with a lot of settings. Any suggestions would be appreciated, thanks.