Windows – Consistently high disk usage slowing down computer

Windows assumes that physical memory has no cost associated with using it. It makes no effort whatsoever to make physical memory free because this makes no sense. If it makes physical memory free, only one of two things can happen:

1. That memory isn't used any time soon. In this case, the effort of making it free was wasted.

2. That memory is used soon. In this case, the effort of making it free was harmful, as now the system simply has to undo that work to use the memory.

Modern operating systems only make physical memory free if they have absolutely no other possible choice.

If you're thinking "I need memory free now so I can use it later", forget it. You can use memory now and use it later. There's no painful tradeoff that you have to make here.

Everything is fine.

If you want a more detailed understanding of how physical memory is being used on your system, try RAMMap.

I would check the amount of video ram VMWare is allocating the the Guest OS. I don't know where the exact configuration options would be inside of VMWare as I don't currently have access to an instance, but I would recommend running dxdiag.exe from within Win7 run prompt and looking to see how much memory the primary display adapter is registering. If this number is low (between 1-128MB), you probably need to allocate more video memory to the guest OS.

DWM is the desktop windows manager which will tend to use resources from the video card. Like an OS installed directly to hardware, if win7 finds that video resources are lacking, it will try to pick up the slack by using CPU resources to compensate.

It also couldn't hurt to either reinstall VMWare tools, or check if there is a newer version available. Since 'Tools probably has components that contribute to the virtualization of video resources, this may be similar to updating your video card driver.