What did you learn today? - Virtual PC Performance

Virtual PC Performance by phildenoncourt

I've been using Virtual PC for over a year now for a variety of different purposes: running beta software, running Linux, testing installs and creating a machine to use for telecommuting. Just last night I helped a coworker on a problem with Windows Server 2003. Instead of having to keep a dual boot machine, I was able to walk through and test various scenarios using my virtual PC image.

Over the past three months or so, the performance has just sucked. To the point where it took two hours to download updates from WindowsUpdate. It didn't used to be that slow, in fact it was almost as fast as my host PC, so I starting checking things out, trying to find the problem.

Turns out the problem was Windows XP Service Pack 2. With Service Pack 2, there was a change that caused virtual machines to run very very very slowly. The recommended solution was to install service pack 1 for Virtual PC. That helped, but things were still pretty slow. The other part of the solution is to uninstall the virtual machine additions and then reinstall them on all your client images. This reduces the amount of thrashing for virtual XP Sp2 machines. This was all information that was contained in the readme file for Service Pack 1. Sometimes it pays to read the Readme files.

SP1 includes the following additional software updates.

Updated version of Virtual Machine Additions. You should update the version of Virtual Machine Additions on all virtual machines where Virtual Machine Additions is installed. For more information, see "Installing Virtual Machine Additions" in Virtual PC Help.

Thursday, November 17, 2005 9:08:47 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

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