Tilde key not working in VMware fusion

Problem:

Today I ran into a small but frustrating problem. The tilde key (~) didn’t work on my VMware fusion machine.

Situation:

I run Windows 10 in VMware fusion on a Macbook Pro. I searched a bit around the internet but didn’t find the right solution. By the way, my keyboard layout is US, so the ‘~’ key should be on the key just left from the ‘1’.
Some trial and error with keyboard combination with CTRL, ALT, Winkey etc didn’t work out. Strangely enough, I got it to work on the command prompt by pressing SHIFT+ALT+`, but that didn’t work on e.g. Notepad++ and Visual Studio.

Solution:

I found out that you can fix that in the settings of the VM itself. You don’t need to shutdown you VM. Just do the following:

• Open the Settings of you VM
• Click on ‘Keyboard & Mouse’
• Just under the list of Profiles, you will see a gear wheel button which you can expand.
• Click in the gear wheel popup menu on the option ‘Edit profile’
• In the popup window, click on the tab ‘Key Mapping’ and unselect the option ‘Enable Language Specific Key Mappings’. This will do the trick (a least for me).
• Close all settings windows, return to your (running) VM and voila, the ‘~’ will work back again.

I assume that this will work on other Windows versions on VM's as well. Just give it a try.

Happy programming!

Change Default UserName in VMware

I was struggling a bit with an incorrect default username my VMware machine was starting with everytime. Everytime I started or reboot the machine, Windows automatically logged on with a default username I don't want to use. This is due to the 'personalize' option during creation of a virtual machine.
Therfore, I first thought it was an VMWare issue, but it turned out it isn't. You need to change something in the Windows registry.

Edit the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mirosoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\WinLogon
Search for the key with the name DefaultUserName and change it to the account you want.

Improve performance of VMWare

For a while I am using VMware environments for SharePoint development projects. Last time, I was really struggling with performance issues. My host OS is Windows 7 (64-bit) with an Intel T7700 processor and 4 GB RAM. About every 10 minutes, the CPU of the virtual machine (Windows 2008 R2, 64-bit) was up to 100% caused by a variety of services (every time another one).

There are some improvements I have made which worked (at least) in my situation.

• Configuration of the virus scanner.
  Exclude the VMware files from real-time protection and for the ThreatSense-engine
• Add some parameters to the VMware configuration file (.vmx)
  - Disable page sharing (improves I/O). Add following line to the vmx-file:
  sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"
  - If you have enough free RAM for all planned concurrent VMs, be sure to disable memory trimming for guest OSes adding the following line to the virtual machine configuration (.vmx) file:
  memTrimRate="0"
• A really performance hitter for virtual machines is a fragmented host OS disk. Be sure to schedule a disk defragmentation on your host OS a regular basis (best: daily)
• See more tips here.

By now, I am a bit more happy