Since I intended to avoid Windows at home, I got a Macbook Pro starting out at my new job. Overall it has been a great machine for doing development; it’s fast, light enough to carry around, its battery life is outstanding, it has a screen that’s gentle to the eyes, and full screen apps together with powerful mouse gestures allow me to quickly shuffle between things not missing touch or a second monitor.

Most of my professinal work is still on the Microsoft stack though, so I’m running a Windows 8.1 VM on VMWare Fusion 6. Much to my frustration, this setup would gradually slow down my system until it would completely grind to a halt every few hours. After complaining about it on Twitter, people said that having 8GB of RAM with half of that allocated to the VM might not be enough.

However after applying some tweaks, I got my system to chug away for a week without any hangs.

Here is what I changed:

1. Turn off App Nap for VMware
2. Install Memory Clean
3. Disable Windows visual effects (Advanced System Settings - Visual Effects)
4. Turn off Resharper Solution-Wide Analysis
5. Turn off Visual Studio rich client visual experience 

Hope it helps.