Windows 7 VM Very Choppy

[UncleFace]

Hello,

I have a Windows 7 Pro VM that I use all the time and am experiencing a lot of choppiness.

When the VM boots up, it usually takes a few minutes for the choppiness to stabilize.  I've noticed recently however, that its been a lot more choppy during normal use and its becoming harder and harder to do regular work.

I also run several Linux VMs and haven't experienced these issues with those.

What could be going on?  Please help!

[wila]

Hi,

A bit hard to say what's wrong with your VM with the current information.

Possible things to check are:

- Task manager, if you have high CPU within the guest all the time, then there's a reasonable chance that your Windows 7 VM is trying to run windows updates. This has become a real issue in the past year (or two)

- Assign too much resources. If you assign too much CPU or RAM to the guest then it will become slow instead of fast because in that scenario you are starving the host from resources.

- An antivirus product going haywire. There's a bunch of antivirus products that are starting to work against virtualisation. For example AVG, WinDefender, Avast.. they all have some hyporvisor checks that have to be disabled to regain normal performance in your VM.

--

Wil

[ColoradoMarmot]

I'll add two more - system restore and backup software can both cause this by having timing triggered if the VM hasn't been booted in a while.

For windows 7 there's an old thread here with two specific KB patches that really help the problem.  But, since patches for it end in January, might be worth moving to Windows 10 if you can.