Really slow?

[RickCAZ]

I have an iMac (late 2012) 8 GB RAM running macOS Sierra.  Everything on the Mac works fine.  I had been running XP inside Fusion, and that loaded quickly with no problems.  Even updates weren't all that slow.  Several months ago uninstalled Fusion and upgraded to the latest version.  I also installed Windows 10.  Since then Win10 loads much more slowly.  Updates are very slow.  Even once the updates are complete the SW seems slow.  I use Win10 very infrequently, only for one particular SW app I can't get a Mac version for, so it isn't a big deal.  I am wondering, since XP inside an older version of Fusion seemed to load and run fairly quickly compared to Win10, is there just something about Win10 that is inherently slower?

[scooper2]

I don't have an explanation for Win10 running much slower than XP. But are you running the VM off of an external USB drive? I've found there's an enormous performance penalty for external drives, particularly with Windows.

Also, 8 GB is not a lot of memory for MacOS plus a Win10 VM, which probably consumes more memory than XP. Could you be memory-starved?

[ColoradoMarmot]

Win10 also uses 2 cores by default, so if the machine only has 2 in it, the CPU is starved as well.

[wila]

Hi,

Actually Windows 10 runs very well on just 1 virtual CPU (my Windows VMs rarely get more as 1 CPU) so if your VM indeed has 2 CPUs then lowering it to one CPU would be the first thing to try. In addition to that, as your host has only 8GB of RAM, do not assign more as 4GB to your Windows 10 VM to give your macOS a chance to run properly as well.

When the host OS suffers, any guest OS it is supposed to run will suffer as well.

--

Wil