Horribly Slow Windows XP VM w/ Fusion

[cliess]

Hi Everyone -

I've got a Windows XP Home VM that the performance is absolutely horrible. From the time I power it on in OSX (10.6.5) until it's usable is a good 10 minutes! It's got 1GB of RAM, which should be way more than enough to get booted quickly. There is no antivirus or other memory/CPU-intensive apps running at startup, either.. it's just painfully slow. I recently upgraded to Fusion v3.1.1 (from 2.x) in hopes that the issue would go away, but no dice there. As a last-ditch effort, I've tried shutting absolutely everything in OSX minus Fusion, and it's still unusable

I also have a Windows 2000 Pro VM that I use for work that is lightning quick with only 256MB of RAM and 1vCPU that has a ton more load at boot time.

In the past, I've had Windows 2008 Server VMs that also have worked great with minimal assigned resources.

The Mac I'm using is a mid-2007 Macbook Pro w/ 4GB of RAM.

Anyone have any ideas/suggestions?

-Craig

[ColoradoMarmot]

Some thoughts:

1) Did you realign the partition, or recreate the VM in Version 3 using Easy Install Wizard?

2) Only use 1 VPU

3) How much free RAM is on the host machine?

4) Remove snapshots, and system restore points

5) Copy the VM to another drive, then copy back (to defrag it).

[frank_wegner]

How did you create the XP VM? (install from scratch? import?)

Was the XP VM always so slow? Or did it work fine a while ago and then it got bad? In the latter case when did this happen and what other things happened around the VM? Did you configure 1 vCPU? Slow boot times can be caused by disk issues (alingment,fragmentation).

From your description it sounds like there could be a configuration error or hardware profile (HAL) mismatch inside the VM guest OS. I am running an XP VM very fast without any issues on Fusion.

There is a very long thread on Fusion perfomance from early 2010 which contains a lot of complaints but it also lists a lot of hints and potential solutions: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1437094 - maybe this is helpful to you.