virtualbox.org

I'm running VirtualBox on my Macbook running Lion (Aluminum 2008, 4GB RAM 1067 MHz DDR3, 160 GB hard drive space, 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo) to run Windows 7 64-bit Professional Edition. Starting up the VM takes upwards of 4 minutes, and once I open up Visual Studio it becomes so slow it's unusable. I'm wondering it's my settings for the VM that's slowing it down. Visual Studio and Microsoft Visio are the only applications I'm interested in running.

Specs for the Windows 7
1024 MB for the base memory
Boot order: CD/DVD-ROM, Hard Disk
Acceleration: VT-x/AMD-V
Video Memory: 16 MB
IDE Secondary Master: Host Drive 'HL-DT-ST DVDRW GS21N
Processor(s): 1 CPU
Virtual Size: 40 GB (fixed size storage)

Should I adjust my RAM, virtual size, or the number of processors to make it run faster, or are my mac's specs just not enough to handle running a virtual machine? My macbook runs other applications pretty quickly (MATLAB, Eclipse, Photoshop run just fine). If it continues being this slow, I'm thinking of using Bootcamp to just install Windows 7 on a separate partition.

Here are the official minimum requirements for Win7 :-
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... quirements

You'll see that you are running with half the official minimum RAM. On top of that you are running Visual Studio, which is not known for its frugal use of memory either.