I'm running the "IE11 on Win7" pre-built VM from Microsoft's modern.ie site (first post, so can't link URLs) on my Mid 2011 13" MacBook Air (1.7Gz i5 with 4GB of RAM) running OS X 10.10.5, with VB 5.0.2. The only changes I made to the VM (from what MS provide) were:
- up the RAM to 2GB
- up the VRAM to 128MB
- Enable USB 2.0 and add 2 USB filters
Whenever the VM is running the Mac's CPU is pegged at 100% and the fan kicks in immediately even if the guest is doing absolutely nothing. If I give the guest 2 CPUs, the host CPU pegs at 200% (both cores fully used). Win7 guest performance is very good in some areas (booting up is very quick), but unusable in others (launching Chrome and getting to a point where I can type something in the address bar takes several minutes). I have previously (a year or so ago) run Win7 and Linux guests using VB on the same machine with no issues.
Before posting I searched here and the rest of the net for similar issues, but those that are mentioned all seem to be related to much earlier versions of VB.
I want to see if things would be better with VB 4.3.30, can I just downgrade, are the VMs backwards compatible?
. Now my Windows 7 guest uses around 10-12% CPU at idle. Thanks for the tip!