virtualbox.org

Hi,
I just upgraded from VB 2.2 to 3.0.2 and expected to see the 2 processors I sent to xp from VirtualBox on Ubuntu. The windoz task mangler only shows 1 processor. Since I have been screwing around with trying to get xp to run successfully for quite a few attempts, mean old uncle bill will not let me load xp any more. Same for the Scrooges at adobe for photoshop.

Unfortunately, the single processor xp is too darn slow to run photoshop at anything greater than 386 speed even on an Intel Core 2, Q9550, quad core running at 2.83 GHz with 4 GB fast DDR3 with 1.6 GB and 2 cores given to XP. Dragon Naturally Speaking takes 10 seconds to figure out each word and has about a 20% hit rate. Any flash in Firefox is extremely choppy and unwatchable. As such, the VM is worthless for anything other than web surfing for text and images. It actually works on iTunes so that is a small consolation. I am hoping that throwing 2 or even 3 processors might make it usable.

Can I hack my registry and have xp magically see both processors?

Thank you,

BrianP

In a way yes: http://www.google.nl/search?hl=nl&q=win ... .org&meta=

Brian, if you are seeing such a slugish speed on the guest something might be wrong with your setup (or you have too high expectations on virtualization).
I've a XP SP3 VM with one core and 384Mb of RAM and it runs just fine.
I can surf and watch any flash movie on your tube or any other site.

Granded I don't do blunt job on it. But its far from unusable.

Are you sure you don't have "too much" stuff running in the background?

MKhaos7,
Top shows me 98% cpu idle, 380 MB memory free, 2.5 GB cached, 6 GB free virtual. Other than Firefox 3.0.11 (a hoggggg) and Xorg, nothing else is taking any resources. I do have Mysql, Samba, NFS, and Apache running but they rarely show up on top at all (less than top and lower down). This is before I start VBox.

I start VBox with 1.6 GB, 2 cores, 64 MB video, 1 VDI drive, 1 DVD, audio (alsa audio + ich ac97), USB enabled (for headset) and pcnet-fast III NAT network. I enable my USB headset for Dragon. Running xp pro, latest patches, Zonealarm firewall only and Avira AV. Nothing but Dragon, file explorer and task manager running. It's really slow, slower than my 2 year old laptop.

With VBox and Firefox/flash running, top shows me 2.3 GB virtual and 1.7 GB mem used by VBox with 28% cpu and 44.9% memory. My host shows 90% cpu idle, 32 MB free, 1.08 GB cached, and 5.8 GB free virtual.

If I turn off dragon and try to watch a video on Firefox, it is choppy and the audio is frequently garbled.
http://www.wtso.net/movie/207-The_Simps ... erest.html even in a small window, the video is choppy and the sound garbled. At full screen, the video is frozen entirely and the audio is about the same. Nothing else running on xp except for file explorer and task manager. Unusable. I even tried killing Firefox in Ubuntu but it did not help.

xp shows ~30% cpu, 332 MB page file and 1.1 GB RAM free. It's like a 386. What am I doing wrong???

Vbox4me2,
I was not able to follow your link. Is there a specific page for enabling SMP?

Thank you,
BrianP

You can't enable smp on a windows Guest, you need to replace the kernal with an smp aware one which is fairly simple, plenty of google links on that one.

Vbox4me2,
Google(windows xp replace the kernal with an smp aware one which is fairly simple, plenty of google links on that one.) returns 780 hits, none of them on the first 2 pages have anything to do with replacing an XP kernel.

Perhaps you would be kind enough to share a bit more of your extensive knowledge on this simple topic with those of us less technically advanced. It sounds to me like you are saying I need to reinstall XP now that the VM has 2 cores. Is that correct? Can you replace a kernel in xp like you can in Linux? This is my last load of XP without spending 3 hours on the telephone with ms-india begging them to let me load it one more time...

Grasping,

BrianP

Hi, go this way http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic. ... 978#p85978

If you use XP Pro, you can even do this from the Device Manager. Replace the ACPI Uniprocessor, or other computer type, with the ACPI Multiprocessor kernel.

reply to a post from here: http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=19878 but there is windows guest and it would be too much OT there...

BrianP wrote: FLASH IS STILL TOTALLY FUBAR as is normal on linux.

hmm... i have not tried flash on windows guest yet: i dont need as its working fine on my linux boxes ... to be true its working fine on my 32bit boxes and mostly on my 64bit box where nspluginwrapper sometimes goes mad, but i recently have seen a 64bit flashplayer-mozilla on debian-multimedia.org experimental repository, maybe i try that some day. I dont know where to find that stuff in Ubuntu (multiverse?) but when using flashplayer-mozilla you should remove swfdec-mozilla (at least on debian) else flash is still broken (dont need to remove swfdec-gnome)

BrianP wrote:I suspect it might have something to do with my ATI R4850 video card. Until Ubu 9.04, absolutely nothing related to moving pictures worked correctly, mostly just crash-n-burn on the 3 previous Ubuntus or the 2 previous Suses. Even running on the host, not the VM, I can still see line artifacts and occasional white boxes whenever I run flash. When I reboot to windoz, the flash looks vastly better.

Strange, even my debian etch box w/ 1,7GHz P4 northwood intel845G integrated graphic can play H.264 encoded video 1280x1024 fullscreen resized from VGA size at near to 100%CPU but it does, flash is no issue (all native of course)

Fixedwheel,
On the 64 bit Ubuntu 9.04 flash is not offered at all AFAIK. They have some funky substitutes which are extremely buggy and often cause lockups of FF and sometimes crash my entire machine (which is never supposed to happen on Linux, is it?). I had to go to Adobe and get their 64 bit Linux flash beta. I had half a dozen broken movie players, umpteen codecs, wrappers and debris scattered from many failed attempt got get flash and DVDs playing. It is quite possible that conflicting libraries may have been part of my problem. I have a somewhat bleeding edge chipset, the Intel P45 on an Asus P5Q3 mobo, latest bios and drivers. I wish Canonical would integrate things a little better. Maybe version 9.10 will be better.

The video on ABC.com (full version of Lost) doesn't work; only the commercials work. I am using the same xp disk I use to run natively. Same ms patches, Zone Alarm firewall, Avira AV, evilnet explorer 8, all of ABC's plugins. Screen goes half black and freezes. Zero other applications showing in task manager.

National Geographic videos are somewhat choppy in the small window and 100% frozen at full screen in both FF 3.5 and ie 8.

DVD movies (Predator) do not play at all due to "copyrighted content". Plays fine in xp native.

I have enable acpi and enable io/apic both checked. 1.6 GB base memory, 2 cpus, no check on enable pae/nx, checks on both enable vt-x/amd-v and enable nested paging, 128 mb video, 3d acceleration is off but greyed out. PIIx4 ide controller. There is an option for ich6, but PIIX4 was the default. SATA is not checked. Since everything is comming from the network, this would not seem to make much difference. Check mount dvd, select Asus dvd /dev/sr1. Check on Audio enabled, alsa audio driver, ich ac97 controller. 1 network card enabled, pcnet-fastiii (am79c973). USB 2.0 enabled. 2 shared folders. I used the ati-driver-installer-9-3-x86.x86_64.run video driver from ATI.com which installed itself effortlessly and without incident.

Photoshop works, but it made me reactivate it due to a "license file no longer usable". It's fairly peppy too. Beyond compare, smart defrag, hijack this, windirstat and the bbc radio player (slightly choppy) all work.

I have dual cores working in VB, but all video related applications are either degraded or broken entirely.

Other than the hard drive stuff, everything else seems pretty standard. What am I screwing up?

Thank you,
BrianP

And, ...
Plain MPG movies (no DRM) play in Nero 7 ultra with 2 seconds of movement followed by 5 seconds frozen. Same in a window or full screen. My guest screen resolution is about 90% full screen on a 2560x1600 on a 30 inch monitor.

Worst of all, Dragon Naturally Speaking is untrainable. I usually get 95% accuracy on xp/native after reading just a few paragraphs in the training. Now, with exactly the same hardware including a Plantronics cs50 USB headset, I have to repeat each word, including a, an, the, we, etc., 15 times before it recognizes it. Sentences never work and it always points back to the first word. The CPU is running below 1/4. I also redid the microphone sound levels and quality check which it passed with a score of 26 signal/noise ratio. It is completely unusable.

I don't know what Dragon uses that Photoshop doesn't other than the USB headset?

It looks like the USB and the video features in VB 3.0.2 are buggy?

BrianP

On the 64 bit Ubuntu 9.04 flash is not offered at all AFAIK. They have some funky substitutes which are extremely buggy and

remove the swfdec-mozilla package, hmm... here i found something about ubuntu and flash: http://www.ubuntugeek.com/fix-for-flash ... 64bit.html

I had half a dozen broken movie players, umpteen codecs, wrappers and debris scattered from many failed attempt got get flash and DVDs playing.

you need libdvdcss2 and w64codecs ... you find them in http://www.medibuntu.org/ http://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu


sorry but i have no idea about all the windoze stuff, i dont know much