OK, I just did some testing, and it was not exactly what I was expecting. For one, it’s kind of hard to intentionally use a lot of memory. The best thing I found was opening a large amount of tabs in Firefox. I maybe could increase my swap space, but I never hung my system up. I shut down the vm and used about 18 gig of ram. I then started the vm.
The deal is, Stacer isn’t exactly accurate when the VM starts. For some reason, memory usage (on Stacer) drops when the vm starts up. Checking the system resource monitor, memory usage briefly jumped to 28 gig in it. It never reflected this on Stacer. However, without the full 16 gig of ram allocated to the vm, Windows boots up, and then shuts back down after a brief period.
I stopped and started Windows numerous times. It would actually make Linux stutter as the memory maxed out, but it never froze up to the point I had to reboot to fix it.
The swap space did about max out during some of this. I do think I will increase the swap space a little.




I did finally get Cinnamon to restart one time. There were some minor issues, but it started back up and was usable for a few minutes. After that, it hung up so hard that only a reboot fixed it. One issue on restart was that the start menu was kind of wonky, like a web page that had lost its css file.
For anyone following this, I found the following link to be helpful.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/143838/how-do-i-restart-cinnamon-from-the-tty