VirtualBox oddly slowing down system?

[xXProSkateXx]

Hi guys, I installed VirtualBox onto my PC and installed Windows XP as my guest (Also, 2000) its fine and all but when I do something tense. my host machine gets slowed down like CRAZY! I set my machines to have 128MB of RAM and still!! My host machine has 4 GB of RAM but that doesn't matter, apparently! Just a few hours ago, I was messing about with my Windows 2000 machine which had 106MB of RAM (I checked my task manager and I had like 3GB RAM free when the guest was running), and I was forcing it to do some stressful stuff but my host machine crashed. It never does that. It just hanged on a screen and nothing happened, I tried to move my mouse but there were no use! So, I had to force shut down the HOST machine not the guest! Any help? It will be appreciated!

- xXProSkateXx

[mpack]

128MB isn't enough for an XP PC to run well. If it doesn't have enough RAM then it'll be thrashing: paging a lot, which can adversely affect the host since it consumes I/O bandwidth.

You might also like to run RAM and disk checks on the host. VMs use lots of RAM and disk space, and for that reason are often the first to trip over problems in those areas.

[xXProSkateXx]

I've already tried 1024MB of RAM which is definitely enough for Windows XP but even loading a webpage like Google slows down the computer and I can tell 'cause when I move the mouse on the Host Machine, it is so laggy. I tried 33MB RAM for Windows 2000 hoping that it will barely take that much RAM but still! Do you think Microsoft VirtualPC 2007 might do it instead (I know Windows 7, Vista or 8 is not supported on VPC2007 but I didn't want to use that anyway, just the older Windows)?

[Reinderien]

Have you tried setting a CPU execution cap?

[mpack]

That's got it backwards. Find out what is bumping against the existing CPU ceiling, and fix it, which you will not do by lowering the ceiling.

This is beginning to sound like the well known "Windows Update Hogs CPU" problem. Search for previous discussion.

[xXProSkateXx]

forget it, Microsoft Virtual PC for me is much better, it does not do what VirtualBox does. You can close this thread up.