Visual Studio Development on Virtual Box, Boot Camp, or VMWare Fusion

I currently have a Mac, 2ghz and 2 gigs of ram, running OS X Leopard and Virtual Box with a Windows 7 Pro 32bit virtual machine.

Performance on the virtual machine is fine for minor tasks but is very clunky while trying to multi-task or develop in Visual Studio 2008.

What would be my best option for being able to use Visual Studio, keeping cost and time in mind?

1) Upgrade ram to 4 gigs ($100). Will this really improve my performance enough to use Visual Studio in a Windows 7 vm? Or am I just wasting time/money?

2) Reinstall/restore Windows 7 disk image as a Boot Camp partition. I assume this should improve my performance, yes?

3) Purchase VMWare fusion instead of VirtualBox. Does Fusion require less resources to run?

I am open to any suggestions.

Thanks in advance

Solution 1:

The more ram that you can dedicate to your virtual machine the better. Even one more gig of ram dedicted to your virtual machine will make it run better. You might also want to go through the services that are running in the background of the windows installation and turn off those that are not needed as those will free up more memory for you.

Solution 2:

I'm using VMWare Fusion on a 4GB MacBook Pro, and I find the performance to be unacceptable. We have a very large codebase, with dozens of projects and hundreds of source files. On my co-workers' real Windows machines, a complete build takes a few minutes. For me, it takes over an hour.

So, I wouldn't recommend it for large-scale Visual Studio development. It might be fine for smaller-scale projects.

Parallels works a lot better with my setup.