VMware tips

When you run a virtual machine there should be a small toolbar at the top of your window, showing some vmplayer options. If you want to run your VM in full screen mode you can select the maximize icon from the toolbar and the vm will expand to fill the whole screen. The toolbar should still stay there. If the toolbar is annoying you, click on the left most "pin" icon, to unpin the toolbar. It will then only display if you mouse over its position at the top of the screen. This gives you the illusion that you are running only windows, rather than a VM. A short cut to get out of full screen mode is Ctrl-Alt.

The virtual machine expands in size as files are moved, since the existing file is not actually removed. For this reason it is important to clean out your virtual machine occasionally so that it does not grow to a ridiculous size.

One way of doing this is to start up the virtual machine, log in as Admin and then run the write zeros executable. The program writezeros.exe can be found in the directory /home/Administrators. Run this program and then reboot your vm to decrease the memory usage.