virtualbox.org

I just purchased a new iMac with a quad core i7 and created a Windows 7 guest with 2 cores, 2GB of RAM and 128MB of video memory. It seems to be running fine, Aero is working etc. I was wondering if anyone knows any tweaks I can do inside the Windows 7 guest to get the most performance out of it? I seem to remember people going into the device manager and changing the processor settings but I couldn't find the thread.

thanks ahead of time.

edit: I just noticed that even though I chose 2 cores when I installed W7 as a guest there seems to be no indication in the guest that it is using 2 cores?

loukingjr wrote: edit: I just noticed that even though I chose 2 cores when I installed W7 as a guest there seems to be no indication in the guest that it is using 2 cores?

Have you looked in device manager? If that doesn't show two cores you are not using two.

no it doesn't. apparently I should of selected 4 cores when I installed W7. VB shows 16 cores available even though I only have 4 real cores or 8 virtual cores in my host. do you know if I would have to reinstall W7 now to get 2 cores or can I just change the processor setting in VB?

That doesn't sound right either. Where are you seeing 16 cores? If you mean in the VirtualBox Manager, that is the same in all machines and does not reflect what is in your host.

A quad core i7 will sometimes display as 8 cores because of hyper threading. It does in Device Manager on my host i7 running Windows 7.

If the guest is Windows 7, increasing the number of cores will probably work. I have done it a few times (on a Windows host) and it loads the extra software OK (with an extra reboot).

BillG wrote:That doesn't sound right either. Where are you seeing 16 cores? If you mean in the VirtualBox Manager, that is the same in all machines and does not reflect what is in your host.

A quad core i7 will sometimes display as 8 cores because of hyper threading. It does in Device Manager on my host i7 running Windows 7.

If the guest is Windows 7, increasing the number of cores will probably work. I have done it a few times (on a Windows host) and it loads the extra software OK (with an extra reboot).

yes, in the VB manager. I don't remember it saying 16 cores when I was running a dual core host.
hmmm, I looked at my settings in the VB manager and although when I created the guest I chose 2 cores, it's set to 1. plus, I tried increasing it with the slider but no matter where I set it it still says 1 core, i.e. it won't change.

edit: hmmm, I just tried it again and it's working. beats me. marking as solved.