If you have multiple installations of Java on your machine, and if the JVM that occurs first in your PATH environment variable is not one in which Eclipse can run, you will see an error on attempted startup. The error will look something like this:
Incompatible JVM - Version [###] of the JVM is not suitable for this product ...
Should this occur, the optimal solution is to change your PATH so that Eclipse finds a usable JVM. If that is not possible, you can specify which JVM Eclipse uses with the -vm runtime parameter. Building on the example above, the shortcut target used to start eclipse might look, in that case, like this (but all on one line):
C:\eclipse\eclipse.exe -vm C:\jdk1.5.0_12\jre\bin\java.exe
-jvmargs -Xms128m -Xmx512m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m
However, this will cause an extra command-window to open on Eclipse startup, and is not an elegant solution.
Another effective method is as following.
Go to the directory where eclipse is installed and find a file called eclipse.ini. Open it and add the following line -vm C:\Java\JDK\1.5\bin\javaw.exe Make sure: 1) You add that text before any -vmargs option that may be in that file. 2) The -vm is on its own line and the path to javaw.exe is on its own line. 3) You specify the full path to your JDK 1.5's javaw.exe
LinkSite: http://ist.berkeley.edu/as-ag/tools/howto/install-eclipse-win.html
