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I currently seem to use about 1.7 GB per virtual machine with Windows XP installed on them, generally running one Internet Explorer window in the VM.

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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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Sorry — is that 2 GB RAM allocated to each VMWare virtual machine, or 2 GB RAM needed on your physical machine? I’d never get away with the latter, as I run three VMs at once, plus lots of other apps (I’m currently using just over 6 GB of RAM as I type this). – Paul D. Waite Oct 26 '10 at 12:19
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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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I am running Win7 32 under Virtualbox on a newer iMac and I give it 1 full gig. It could probably use more, but unless you are chewing through video, no point. – Braden Oct 26 '10 at 19:41
win7 uses more than 1 gig just after startup ) After few hours of webserfing almost every browser eats 200-300Mb. Also I forget about security software: 150-200 mb. – Timur Sadykov Oct 26 '10 at 21:51
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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.

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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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While it is possible to run Windows XP/Vista/7 with 512 MB of RAM, I know it's not going to be even close to decent performance. Boot up time will be horrible. The host system really should have at least 4 GB of RAM, and at least 768 - 1 GB dedicated to each virtual system. – Benjamin Schollnick Oct 27 '10 at 17:34
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