Opening New Virtual Box

[The Doctor]

I currently have a working version of Virtual Box running on my Mac. I'm using Windows 7 operating system. I'm now finding that I'm running out of memory. I set the original system up for 20 GB. I don't want to make the same mistake twice and am thinking of setting it up for 100 GB. The Mac has 1 TB total and just over 11 is currently in use. Any suggestions? I would like to keep the current system running until I'm sure the new one is running okay. Is that possible?

[noteirak]

I personally always set my Windows 7 disks to 50 GB, this leaves room for the OS (between 20 & 25 GB after all updates + pagefile) and other programs + docs.
100 GB seems to me a bit overkill, unless you plan on using a lot of big files?

[mpack]

64GB. If in doubt, always go for the next higher power of 2. Computers will love you for it.

[rpmurray]

If you set the virtual disk as a dynamically expanding file, what's the harm in making it 100 GB? It will only use as much space as it needs and if you're only using 20 GB of it then that's as big as it will grow.

[mpack]

Well, users do occasionally do things inside the guest (e.g. running a disk surface check, or running sdelete) which can cause the disk to grow to full size. Best IMHO to avoid making it unnecessarily large.

[The Doctor]

Thanks to all for you help. Sounds like I should set it for 64 GB and put a 50 GB limit on Windows 7. I'm hoping that leaves enough room to run Windows Mail and a few other Windows-based applications. Most of what I do is done on the Mac side of the computer.