Hi,
The problem is that there are so many variables unknown to anybody reading your question that it is hard to give good advise.
You said you cloned from a Dell computer. Most people here will advise you to start fresh, not do a Physical to Virtual migration as that by itself is a likely candidate for things being slow. Another reason is that the Windows license for your Dell is normally tied to the hardware (OEM licensed) and running it as a virtual machine on your Mac breaks the Eula from Microsoft.
On a similar machine like yours I used to run 2 to 3 windows VMs concurrently and all of them pretty responsive, boot time OK. Of course none of those VMs are running anything heavy and all of my VMs had only 1 virtual CPU assigned.
Even nowadays I usually stick with 1 CPU, but 2 should be fine too.
Your memory settings of 2 GB are fine as well, depending on what you run in your VM.
There's a number of general tips:
- remove old drivers for obsolete hardware, steps are here: Converter Tips | vSphere-land start reading at "Clean-Up After Power On"
- remove any Dell specific software like companion software or hardware assisting software that you can find under "Add/Remove software"
- disable the windows service that takes care of the defragmenting. While your windows still wants to be defragmented, the disk is now virtual and defragmenting it at guest level will only fragment it at host level so you would have to defragment at host level after defragmenting the guest. Disable the in Windows 7 Control Panel. (System and Security -> Administative Tools -> Defragment your hard drive -> Turn off schedule)
- disable system restore -> Right click "Computer" -> Properties -> System Protection. As your windows is virtual you can take easy backups of your entire windows when it is shut down (with Fusion off) just copy the entire VM to another disk location. Please note that Time Machine is not a good backup method for virtual machines. Search the forum on details for that.
Snapshots are also helpful as alternative for system restore, but beware that you not run with many snapshots as it will slow things down. The general tip there is to not run with snapshots, commit them after things work OK, a snapshot is not a backup and should not be used as such.
- Do not use AutoProtect in snaphots as it isn't helpful at all and will more likely trigger problems as actually help.
Those tips should get you started,
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Wil