virtualbox.org

I am used to the following:

Windows XP guest running in VBox on 7 year old Dell Inspiron 530. Even though the machine is extremely underpowered, and cannot run the latest Ubuntu except by using Xubuntu or other less powerful desktop, the performance of XP under VBox was acceptable.

Now I have a new Lenovo Thinkpad T540 with 8 GB of Ram. Ubuntu 14.04 (64 bit) runs well here. I installed Windows 7 under VBox here and it runs, but dog slow! Everything is slower. Net access. Graphics. Move a window and wait five seconds after the move for the old location of the window to disappear. Everything, seemingly is slow. The performance really isn't acceptable. I haven't begun trying to tweak it yet. Where do I begin? I've allotted 1GB Ram to the VM and 27 MB to the display.

Other than allocate more ram to display or vm, is there something else I could try?

Post the guests log file ( as an attachment )

attaching windows 7 guest log

I'm not as adept at reading the log files as some but, it looks like the guest additions were never installed although the GA .iso is still mounted. you seem to have 2D disabled in the guest for some reason and I can't tell if 3D is enabled. The log you posted is incomplete. You need to shutdown your guest before posting a log.

I enabled 2D and 3D and tried once again to install the Guest Additions (how do you know they're installed?) and things are working much better now. Thanks.

stevecoh1 wrote:I enabled 2D and 3D and tried once again to install the Guest Additions (how do you know they're installed?) and things are working much better now. Thanks.

You're welcome. The easiest way to tell if the guest additions are installed is if the features they give you actually work. I.E. resizable screen, shared folders, mouse integration, shared clipboard etc..

ok, the guest additions are installed.

On some guests there's also a little icon on a toolbar, hovering over it will even tell you what version of the GAs is installed.