I just installed Ubuntu 10.04 on my laptop and installed a freshly downloaded version of VMware Workstation 7.1.1.

I have several existing VMWare images I run , right now I am trying to run a Windows XP VM. It will start and I can run it for a while but it is REALLY sluggish. After about 5 the whole VMWare workstation crashes on my Laptop - it just disappears.

Does anybody have an idea what this might be?

I haven't had that happen - is there any information in /var/log/Xorg.0.log, /var/log/messages or /var/log/syslog that tells you more? I don't remember whether VMWare logs (I use VirtualBox these days), but you could also look in the directory that your VMWare images are kept to see if there are log files.

There will also be vmware logs in the directory where the virtual machine resides. Probably one or another of those logs will have some good clues about what is happening.

VMware will appear sluggish if you don't have enough RAM in your system or if you assign too much of your available RAM to the virtual machine. In this latter case, Linux will become EXTREMELY swappy, responsiveness will be horrid, and eventually Linux will kill the offending process which in this case is VMware. You might try turning down the amount of memory allocated to the virtual machine.

Indeed the guests logs will be in where the virtual machine resides but the logs for VMware itself will reside in /var/log/vmware/. It's worth looking at both.

I was actually looking at those - I think I might know what is happening: my system memory suddenly shows 3 GB i/o 4 GB ... I think one of my RAM chips might have gone bad and now the VM is still set to too much memory ... I am making some back-ups (in case I screw up beyond repair) and will set the memory lower etc. ... lets see what happens. I will also go through the log file with a fine tooth comb and see what I can do about the system memory ...

Thanks for all the good advice!

short correction - the memory is of course not bad ... I just never noticed that for some reason PAE was not installed so 32 bit only recognizes 3GB (I should have noticed). I just installed the PAE headers and now we are good to go with 4 GB - now off to checking those log files and VM memory settings ...

Glad I steered you in the correct direction.

Yep, looks like it was the memory settings. the VM has been running great since I made those changes. I will have to write that one up to user error! Thanks for the help!