• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Windows 7 VM in Virtual PC Boot Time

A

atreidesgoldenpath

Gawd
Joined
Jul 20, 2008
Messages
525
What's your boot time in this scenario?

Have Windows 7 64-bit host with 32-bit guest VM.
It is taking my system up to 3 minutes to boot the VM.
Seems way too slow to me.

I get a dialog "starting the virtual machine" and not a regular Windows boot screen.
This lasts for 2-3 minutes.

Is this normal? I'm a pretty noob when it comes to Virtual PC.

Thanks!!
 
How much ram do you have allocated to the VM?

Edit: And how much hard drive space?
 
2gb should be enough, but bump it to 3gb and see if that makes a difference. As that'd be the max that 32bit Windows would see anyway.

shane
 
I know for Hyper-V, fixed disk gives better performance than dynamic. You might try making another with a fixed disk.
 
Is Virtual PC not the most common way for people here to virtualize? Should I be using something else instead (Hyper-V? I looked at the webpage, looked like an enterprise solution to me.......)
 
Throw a SSD in there. On my desktop I have Virtual PC and VirtualBox for sandbox VM's. Much faster with SSD's versus traditional disks which makes sense.
 
I've used Virtual PC, VirtualBox and VMWare. VirtualBox was my personal preference.
 
In my limited experience, Virtual PC is very slow. VMWare Player and Virtual Box have been a lot faster for me.
 
I have a Windows 7 Basic VM running with 1 GB of RAM on a i7 920 under Windows Virtual PC. All my VMs are on an old WD Raptor 300 GB drive that just has my VMs, my profile, and games on it.

Boot time for it is about 30 seconds, but all the integration features are turned off as they are unsupported under Windows 7 basic. The integration features being turned on at statup causes the "Starting Virtual Machine" progress bar to appear and not show a Window with the normal boot sequence.

If you aren't using the shared drive functionality and stuff for the integration pieces, it takes some time for all the authtentication pieces of that to start up. You can still share USB devices and such without the integration turned on. The only thing I really miss with integration features turned off is the clipboard sharing. I just map to the admin shares if I need to access something on the host from inside the VM.
 
Wow, thanks nessus!

I disabled integration features on this VM, and it booted up well under a minute in Virtual PC. So the integration features were adding up to 2 additional minutes? Ouch.

I also installed Virtualbox and playing around with that as well. But without integration, they boot about the same on my machine.
 
I also have noticed much better performance with a fixed disk, so consider that as well.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top