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Jonathan Allen
Asked: 2009-06-04 15:16:31 +0800 CST

Virtual PC Performance Issue on 64-bit Vista

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I am running 64-bit Vista with 8 GB ram and 4 cores. It supports hardware-assited virtualization.

Using Virtual PC 2007, my newly built 32-bit Windows XP Pro VM is running incredibly poorly. Even the simplest actions like showing the start menu will cause the CPU usage to hit 100%.

The same VM setup hosted on a dual-core 32-bit XP Pro box without hardware-assited virtualization work just fine.

Any suggestions? Right now it is almost unusable on my Vista box and I don't even know where to start looking for the cause.

virtualization virtual-machines

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer
    • Enable Hardware Assisted Virtualization in the BIOS.
    • Install the VM Tools on the guest OS.
    • Run your VM's from a separate spindle if you can. A lot of times the bottleneck is disk.
    • Give VM's the right amount of memory for the task. If the VM is constantly swapping it can play havoc with performance.
    • Make sure the host and guest operating systems are defragmented.
    • Cut off fancy gui effects on the guest systems.
    • Exclude your .vhd,.vmdk and associated files from the host systems active anti-virus scanning.

    Just a few tips that should help. By the way I have the same exact setup on my desk as well (Quad Core Intel Q9400, 8Gb RAM, Vista 64) and have been using Vmware Server 2 with multiple VM's without issue.

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  2. Are you sure that the Virtualisation technology is enabled in your BIOS? Your setup sounds identical to mine (Quad Core, 8Gb, Vista x64) and I run dozens of Virtual Machines (albeit VMWare) without it missing a beat.

    As an experiment, I turned Virtualisation off and found performance was greatly hampered.

    That would be your first stop - checking to see if it's actually enabled in your BIOS.

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