Question about guest performance

[mrdejong]

Hello,

My problem:
1) My Windows XP virtual machine has become so slow that starting up takes about 8 minutes and for example after reaching the desktop Ctrl-E takes about 1 minute. Launching Outlook takes about 4 to 8 minutes.

2) Windows is shutting down.... stays many times forever until Machine, reset yes plz... It's random sometimes two times in a row, sometimes multiple times it just works.

This all occurred since last week after extensive moving around of large files. So I guessed it was all about defragmentation and contig proved 41% file fragmentation. So I extended my partition from 20Gb up to 40Gb to make sure that Power Defragmenter(contig gui) had enough space to defrag.
So far power defragmenter is still running (and hanging the system now and then $#!@$#)

Am I searching in the right direction? I am really tired of staring at slow moving progress indicators in obscure commandlines. I want to get stuff done...

Any help would be appreciated.

Manfred

I have the following setup:
Host:
AMD Athlon II X4 640, 4Gb RAM, bootHD=ext2, datahd's containing the VM's=/dev/sdb1 type:fuseblk
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (kernel 2.6.32-33-server)

Virtualbox settings:
Base memory: 1852Mb (less then 50% of the total available)
Ticked to work: Enable IO APIC, Enable PAE/NX, Enable VT-x/AMD-V, Enable Nested Paging
Also two shared folders attached in the background one folder is situated on the same fysical harddisk and one folder on an external USB 3.0 harddisk.

Guest:
Windows XP, Fixed pagefile of 2Gb, One user (me)
ATM I interact with the machine while sitting behind Gnome on the Ubuntu host. I start it up via Oracle Virtualbox GUI from within X.

[vbox4me2]

Base memory: 1852Mb (less then 50% of the total available)
Ticked to work: Enable IO APIC, Enable PAE/NX, Enable VT-x/AMD-V, Enable Nested Paging

Set ram for the Guest to 1024.
Disable PAE/NX and Nested Paging.
After that you can try flipping IO APIC.