Speed, speed, speed ... after all, is not so great?

[deepsea]

I have been using Parallels 3.0 with Win XP for say 2,5 yeas on a Macbook with OS X 10.4.

With the advent of VirtualBox 3 I dug out the old clonezilla CD and cloned my windows install into VirtualBox (I had to uninstall parallel tools). I made the clone working in virtualbox and downloaded a benchmarking tool - a fairly simple no-cost cpu benchmark (MCS CPU Benchmark 2008 6.3).

Virtualbox was about 2950 points (give or take 50) and parallels was about 3550 (give or take 50) - PARALLELS 3.0 IS 20% FASTER.

Anyway, any thoughts you might have are appreciated.

[Sasquatch]

The benchmark you did isn't really valid, because the clone still had all the hardware drivers from Parallels on it and that can degrade performance. Best benchmark you can do is do a clean install on both systems (no need to activate Windows for it, you still have 30 days for that) and run it on that. After you did the benchmark, install the Guest Additions for both systems and run the benchmark again.

[deepsea]

I did a clean windows xp install including most windows updates and the SATA driver from Intel and ended up with a windows ready for everyday's use.

I run the benchmark again and found the virtualbox windows to be slightly slower than the windows I cloned from parallels. I also downloaded a more comprehensive benchmarking tool (performancetest 7.0) and found the same: windows xp under parallels 3.0 appears to do a lot better when benchmarked (in almost all tests) than a similar install in virtualbox.

[Sasquatch]

And your own experience? Does VB feel faster and more responsive than Parallels?

[deepsea]

Should it feel faster and more responsive? I read that benchmarks are not reliable after all but I wouldn't know...

Virtualbox appears to crash on exit and after leaving the computer unattended it hangs (though saving the machine state and reopening again solves the issue without loosing data - but still annoying). Not being able to drag and drop files between desktops is rather inconvenient too.

Anyway, to be fair, for a free programme it is still amazing to see what it does.

[Perryg]

Should it feel faster and more responsive? I read that benchmarks are not reliable after all but I wouldn't know...

Virtualbox appears to crash on exit and after leaving the computer unattended it hangs (though saving the machine state and reopening again solves the issue without loosing data - but still annoying). Not being able to drag and drop files between desktops is rather inconvenient too.

Anyway, to be fair, for a free programme it is still amazing to see what it does.

For the crash on exit this is (for me) only experienced in Windows XP. I use the ACPI shutdown in the VBox menu to handle that.
Hangs on unattended was caused by XP screen saver and or power saving features. Shutting these off fixed that.
Drag and drop is another issue. Look at it like this, can you drag and drop to another physical PC running on your desk? It is really hard but they are working on it.