S-L-O-W WinXP

[juggle]

I have installed VirtualBox on my Ubuntu PC and have set up a replica of my old Win XP system. I use XP for Skype (USB handset only works with Windows) and document & photo sync with camera-phone-PDA (Windows-only software)

This can work, but the WinXP VM runs painfully slowly. I thought this might be a shortage of base memory allocated to the VM, so I increased this from 512MB to 1GB, but there was little improvement, if any.

VirtualBox would seem to offer a much better alternative to dual-booting to my old WinXP system, but the s-l-o-w running speed of the WinXP VM is intolerable. WinXP was slow enough before!

Any ideas?

My system spec:
Pentium 4 @ 3GHz
2GB RAM
Ubuntu 10.04 (host)
WinXP SP3 (guest)

[mpack]

Install the GAs, and use the task manager to search for unwanted background tasks. Particularly network and disk related.

[juggle]

Install the GAs, and use the task manager to search for unwanted background tasks. Particularly network and disk related.

I'm assuming GA's = Guest Additions - I had installed these already.

When I press ctrl-alt-del while running WinXP VM, I get the Ubuntu shutdown / restart menu.
How else can I get to the WinXP task manager?

ETA
Ah-ha! Just discovered the "insert ctrl-alt-del" command on the VBox Machine menu..

It looks like the Palm Desktop (palm.exe) is using 45%-55% CPU. (Doing what?)
This is the Windows application that I need to sync with my camera-phone, so presumably not much I can do.
I never had any problem with this on my old XP system.

[mpack]

It looks like the Palm Desktop (palm.exe) is using 45%-55% CPU. (Doing what?)
This is the Windows application that I need to sync with my camera-phone, so presumably not much I can do

Does it need to be running all the time, in every VM?

Regardless, it's possible that you don't have networking properly configured yet. E.g. your VM isn't connected to the correct workgroup or domain: I don't use Palm desktop, so it would be up to you to investigate the details of what's required, or what diagnostics tools are available. I can tell you that there is no particular reason why VM networking should be noticeably slower than native.

[juggle]

I have used Ubuntu's System Monitor to see what demands the VM places on my host system: System Memory use jumps from ~ 10% to > 50%; CPU use rises from ~ 5% up to 75%-100%. Stopping the Palm Desktop application reduces CPU use to around 20%-30%.

It looks like the Palm Desktop (palm.exe) is using 45%-55% CPU. (Doing what?)
This is the Windows application that I need to sync with my camera-phone, so presumably not much I can do

Does it need to be running all the time, in every VM?

No, not really. I have removed Palm Desktop from the Start-Up list and the VM runs a lot quicker.

It is still prone to extreme slowness though, especially when using Skype. Gets its knickers in a proper unresponsive twist. If left to recover long enough it will eventually manage to untwist them.

The network seems to work OK: Attached to "NAT" and "cable connected" box is ticked. All the other settings are greyed out.

[Hans Eberhardt]

Stop the indexing service if running

[mpack]

The network seems to work OK:

Since your big cpu hogs seem to be all network related, I would reserve judgement on whether your network is really working ok.

Attached to "NAT" and "cable connected" box is ticked. All the other settings are greyed out.

If you had a Windows host I would say that means you didn't install the host network filter drivers. But, I'm not a Linux host expert. You might want to ask about that in the "Linux Hosts" forum.