Win7 Slowness on Mac OS X Retina Host

[loopholed]

Host: i5, 16GB RAM, Mavericks.
Guest: Win 7 Ultimate 64bit.
VB: 4.3.10

RAM Allocated to guest: around 8GB.

Symptoms: Lag, slowness, unresponsiveness.

Examples of symptom:

- Window dragging is a real chore. Lag, slowness, takes time to recover.
- Clicking sometimes won't register, or will at very late times.
- Etc...

What I did:

- Searched the forums.
- Installed, uninstalled, and re-installed Guest Additions, this time without 3D.
- Searched some more.
- Installed extension Pack for respective VB version
- Things got better, but not that better.
- All it takes is one more window or task to make things go really wrong.

Right now:

3D acceleration disabled.
2D acceleration enabled.
Slowness continues :/

I know this is "kind of" a known bug but I don't see the forums here filled with complaints so I figured some users must have the right configurations there!


Thanks for any help. Will provide any details needed.

[socratis]

I'm not sure if this is a Retina-based-Mac issue or not. This thread seems to contain the same symptoms as your report. Take a look at the video that 'thanar' has uploaded. It also references several threads and a ticket (at least) that may be worth your reading time.

One thing that I noticed that has not been mentioned, is something that I read in one of Apple's KB articles. In there it talks about "Low Resolution" per application. Have you tried it? Note that in order to enable it you have to change the "VirtualBox.app/Contents/Resources/VirtualBoxVM.app". Not sure if it's going to work or not.

Another thing worth trying is changing your Mac's native resolution. Less sure if this is going to work either.

[loopholed]

Thanks for your reply socratis.

Unfortunately, after reading those threads and applying your suggested changes, the problem persists.

Here is what I attempted, things that didn't work:


- Changing input for mouse from P2/Mouse to USB
- Changing input for moust from USB to USB-based tablet (or something along these lines)
- Changing settings from 1 processor to 4
- Turning on PAE/NX


At this point, and from researching from other threads, it seems that the problem is specifically with mouse movement: When the mouse is moved (very) slowly, the issue is almost unnoticed, however, even normal movement can cause lags and delays. I did notice the CPU shoots up to around 30% when the mouse is moved quickly while two applications are open.

At this point, I'm also not sure what to do next — it seems that VB has some issues with Retina MacBooks, and my options are slowly being eliminated towards Parallels. Anyone has exprience with this one and how it performs generally? I'd love to get VB to work but it's getting tiresome.

[loopholed]

And now all of a sudden the guest Win won't connect to the internet. Ugh.."no wired cable is connected"

[socratis]

I didn't say anything about the mouse, or any other settings in the VM (that's most probably how you broke your network). I said about the HOST resolution. Read the links again, and remember, this might be a HOST issue.

[loukingjr]

mouse movement is a symptom and not the problem. first of all you need 3D enabled to run Windows 7 at a reasonable speed on any host. you also need to make sure the WDDM driver is installed and not DirectX. When installing the guest additions, check Direct3D support and when it asked if you'd rather install DirectX click no. You may still have to switch to a lower resolution to get reasonable speeds. I don't have a Apple laptop to check. There is a free software program called QuickRes which helps switching resolutions.