Slow or hangs in execution of old Windows guests regarding the support.

[sausisse]

Hello.

I'm testing a bunch of old Windows imagesfrom the MS-DOS to the XP era and for unknowns reasons, in VMware Workstation 17.0.2, the speed is considerably worse than in VMware Workstation 17.0.0 specially in loading and/or playing audio files.

Some issues that I've noticed are:

30+ minutes of formatting a 2 Gb drive (MS-DOS)

Strugulling to play a 6.22 Mb MP3 file (320 Kb/s of bitrate) with VLC or Windows Media Player (Windows 2000 and NT 4, although this seems like a bitrate issue to me)

Hangs (or very slow) while loading setup (Windows XP x64, Windows NT 4.0)

Loading issues (Windows 2000)

Sound tearing (Windows XP, Vista (unironcally), 2000)

I wonder how that happened and how to fix it.

And in case you wonder, side channels mitigation, even desactivated, is still slow.

[Kinnison]

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[sausisse]

Hello

Yeah I think too. Who would fix sound issues with an 20+ years old OS? But I'ts sad since the problem only appeared with the 17.0.2 version.

Just wondering how I can fix this from my side.

[Technogeezer]

A couple of thoughts. 

Check the vmware.log file for the VMs and look for the line starting with “Monitor Mode”. If it’s “ULM”, then Workstation is using Hyper-V as the hypervisor, not VMware’s hypervisor.

Native Hyper-V doesn’t support those old operating systems so it would not surprise me if they have issues when running on a Hyper-V hypervisor. If that’s the case, try turning off Hyper-V in Windows (there are posts here in the forum on how to do that) and see if the issue persists.

Also, what chipset is in use? There are performance issues with Alder Lake (12th gen Core) CPUs when Hyper-V is the hypervisor used by Workstation. People have addressed that by either disabling Hyper-V entirely or disabling power throttling on the vmware-vmx.exe file using

powercfg /powerthrottling disable /path "C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\x64\vmware-vmx.exe"

[Kinnison]

Comment removed...

[sausisse]

Hello !

Sorry for the late responce, I was busy.

I've checked the Monitor Mode and it said ULM.

The chipset that is in use is a Intel H510 chipset, used for 10th and 11th gen Intel Processors.

I've ckecked to disable Hyper-V but it dosen't appeaur to the Windows feature. Weird.

Hope this helps!