I recently upgraded to VM 5.02 professional. I have been running a virtual machine using Win XP Home Ed with SP3 (32 bit) for several years and the vm lately has been causing my iMac to run very sluggishly unless I suspend it. It may be because I only have 4.64G left of the 50G space I originally allocated to the vm when I created it. I decided rather than trying to eliminate more programs to gain space for the XP, I would just move the vm to my 2T external drive (which I use for Time Machine backups of my Mac, and has lots of space left) and would create a new vm on the Mac using Windows 7, and allocating more hard drive space to it than I did to the XP. I assume that if I move the XP vm to the external drive, it will free up the 50G allocated to it, and I will still be able to access the files on it if I need to after I move it to the external drive. My question, assuming this makes sense, is should I get Windows 7 32 bit or 64 bit for the new vm operating system? My Mac's hard drive still has 350G of it's 750G capacity available right now. Here are my specs:
Model Name: iMac (OS X vers. 10.6.8)
Model Identifier: iMac7,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 4 MB
Memory: 2 GB
Bus Speed: 800 MHz
Boot ROM Version: IM71.007A.B03
SMC Version (system): 1.21f4
Do I need more memory in my Mac to make 64 bit worthwhile? If so, is it worth upgrading or should I just get 32 bit? Does my plan make sense? I have been reading several forums and am a little confused. Please don't get too technical if possible. Thanks