I have an older machine running Manjaro Linux.AMD Sempron 3100 @ 1.8GHz I have 2 Gigs of RAM and this machine runs fine as far as day to day use. It's plenty fast. I can install and run VMWare BUT the install process is painfully slow. When I try to run anything it takes forever to boot and lags so bad after that boot it is not really useable.

When loading a virtual machinie I always use the 32 bit versions and have tried giving it from 512 mgs RAM all the way up to 1.5 gigs. When I use like 1.5gig of RAM I may see a little more response but very little IF ANY.

I like VMWare better [on other computers I have tried it on] than the other virtualization programs but I still can't get any to work on this or my laptop which has almaost exactly the same specs.

Is this just because of the old machine or might I be doing something wrong?

Thanks!

there's a processor feature that enables virtual machines to give some workload directly to the processor and thus run much faster.

i once tried virtualbox on an older laptop that didn't have this feature (i forget the name) and the symptoms were much like what you describe.

if your processor has the capability, it still might be necessary to enable that in the linux kernel.

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None of the Sempron 3100 CPUs feature hardware support for virtualization. Without that feature, as ondoho already pointed out, you won't have fun with virtualization with VMware, it will be very slow.
You may be better off with using Virtualbox, it supports virtualization without hardware support better, but in the long run a hardware upgrade is the only option to get sufficient speed for the guest OS.

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Even if it supported hardware virtualization, a 1.8ghz cpu is not sufficient for a host.