XP guest performance - raw partition or file?

[trmsw]

Hello all,

I'm wondering how to get useable performance from an XP virtual machine inside linux. The only reason I want XP is to use Macromedia Flash.

I'm using Virtualbox 2.1.4 in ubuntu on an Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo T7100 @ 1.80GHz, with 2Gb ram, running XP from the raw (SATA) partition with about 800Mb of ram. It's just not fast enough.

Would it be quicker to run XP from a file image instead of the raw partition?

TIA,
Tom

[trmsw]

I got a dramatic improvement by switching windows to use a uniprocessor instead of multiprocessor CPU, and the VM is now useable.

Lucky, because booting it outside virtualbox gives me a BSOD (despite a different hardware profile).

[TerryE]

There is little or no difference between raw partition and Disk Image performance.