Windows XP Pro performance really slow

[jzwolak]

I'm having some issues with performance under Windows XP Pro (as the guest OS). I have a Java project I work on and it compiles in about 15 minutes in a Windows Guest. It takes about 6 minutes natively in Mac OS X. It takes about 6 minutes on a Windows guest in VMware or Parallels. It takes about 6 minutes in a Linux guest on VirtualBox.

How do I get it to take 6 minutes on a Windows guest in VirtualBox? It seems that there is a configuration setting or a Windows driver that I need to change / update. But I found a number of performance tips on the Internet and none worked. I actually blogged about the performance of the machines if you want to see my benchmarks:

http://jason.zwolak.org/technoblog/2010 ... irtualbox/

The settings for the virtual machine are identical for the Windows and Linux guest OSes... and are as follows:

• Ram: 512 MB
  HD: 15 GB
  Cores: 1
  Enable I/O APIC: off
  Enable EFI: off
  Enable PAE/NX: off
  Enable VT-x: on
  Enable Nested Paging: off

VirtualBox tools (guest additions) is installed. I'm using VirtualBox 3.2.10. I just did a fresh install of XP Pro and installed all updates. The virus scanner is disabled for my benchmark.

I tried something like this:
http://matt.bottrell.com.au/archives/26 ... mance.html
to improve disk performance and it didn't work.

Any ideas or suggestions?