Win 7 - VMware Fusion - sloww..

[UPDATE] +2G memory later... problem resolved...

My darling little MacBook with VMware Fusion/Windows 7 when intially installed was unconscionably slooow.
I had all the settings on the VM decently set. 1 processor and 1 GB mem for Win 7,
no 3D graphics. Set Win user exeperience to optimize for performance in GUI.

But after installing VMware tools (If you can't figure that out you should be shot in the head because Fusion prompts you about 11000 times to do it.)
...And installing piles of windows updates and rebooting a few times, things seem better.  This makes sense, because windows generally has to load lots of patches after an install.  I have seen windows grind to a halt in if you download the windows updates, and install, but don't reboot. My hunch is that the cause has something to do with memory use.

We'll see....

-----
Model Name:    MacBook Pro
  Model Identifier:    MacBookPro5,5
  Processor Name:    Intel Core 2 Duo
  Processor Speed:    2.26 GHz
  Number Of Processors:    1
  Total Number Of Cores:    2
  L2 Cache:    3 MB
  Memory:    2 GB
  Bus Speed:    1.07 GHz

OS X version 10.5.8
build 9l31a

VMware Fusion 2.0.6

Windows 7 Virtual Machine under VMware Fusion

I recently got a new MacBook Pro. I have used various flavors of VMware in the past (VMware workstation under Windows and Linux desktops; VMware Server and ESX 3.5 ; VSphere) - But never  Fusion.
It's pretty darn easy to install. However, the version of VMware fusion I have installed (2.0.6) does not have a virtual machine type for Windows 7  In the past It seems that you can use another VM type with an unsupported OS with good results.. In fact the VMware Team fusion blog recommends using Win 2008 server virtual machine.
Other salient points they suggest:

• Disable 3D Acceleration
• Disable Shared Folders

...Wah, my .iso file was corrupt. See you in 4 hours afer I get another copy. ...two weeks later
Well it turned out that the version of Windows 7 that I was entitled to was an "upgrade" version. And therefore crippled and not bootable. I could have  gone through a whole install of Windows XP, and then upgraded it. But what a waste. But how to make it bootable?

The most straighforward brain-dead way I found is to copy the .iso to a windows machine, and use a program microsoft provides which will make my .iso file into a bootable DVD or USB : http://store.microsoft.com/Help/ISO-Tool .  However, this is an annoying and inelegant solution. All I  really want to do is to graft one little boot loader file into the .iso which is already on my disk. To accomplish this I have to burn my non-bootable iso to a dvd or otherwise copy it to a windows machine, and then burn it to a dvd or bootable usb stick there, and then bring it back.? Wah.

Yikes. I would much rather spend 5 hours learning about how to do this  smarter than spend 1 hour doing something dumb.

Hmm! Boot sectors and bootloaders and .isos oh my!

I got some inspiration from this post:
http://milliamp.org/2009/windows-7-64-bit-on-an-aluminium-macbook-pro/
To look at mkisofs on OS X as the means to slam that boot sector into my existing .iso file.

 Steps:

1. Download mkisofs, from helios: http://www.helios.de/news/news07/mkisofs.phtml
   
2. Open a terminal window (terminal.app) and copy the executable into somewhere in your path (e.g. /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin )
   
3. Find the existing .iso file in finder and double click it to mount it as a file system. 
4. Use mkisofs to create the new .iso file by copying all the files from the mounted .iso file together with the new boot sector file:

mkisofs -v  -hfs-unlock  -N   -U -udf  -no-emul-boot   -no-hfs  -nolimit-pathtables  -ignore-changed-files  -b boot/etfsboot.com -c boot.catalog  --osx-hfs  -iso-level 4 -o /Users/yournamehere/yourshinynewisofile.iso  /Volumes/thenameofoldisofile

not sure that all flags are necessary (e.g. -ignore-changed-files, --osx-hfs, -nolimit-pathtables?). The key discovery was that etfsboot.com is the boot image in /boot on the non-bootable iso, which is written to the boot sector (-b flag) by mkisofs.

And guess what it worked!