Slow performance Win XP with Autocad

[Linux987]

Hello everyone. I am not an expert here so I appreciate your help.

We have an old version of Autocad 2000 that has a plugin that converts drawings to cut files for our older machines. For various reasons we now have to virtualize this process.

The problem is that when dealing with complex drawings, in a virtualized environment, the machine bogs down and goes very slowly. When using a native machine ( a much older, slower computer by todays standards) there is absolutely no lag. It will convert the drawings to cut files in seconds. When we use a virtualized image of this computer with virtualbox, it can take 10 to 15 minutes to process the same file.

Does anyone have any recommendations on how to speed it up?

The machine loading the virtual box has windows 8, it is a new haswell i3, 8 gigs of ram, a new generation SSD. No separate video card. It is hosting a windows XP installation. I gave the machine 1024 MB of ram and 32 mb of video memory. Other than that, I left everyone alone. I simply installed the virtual machine and loaded up the image.

Any tweaks I might try?

[mpack]

Make sure you install the Guest Additions (see chapter 4), as that will provide smoother graphics.

Otherwise, you have not mentioned what size and type of disk you gave the VM?

Also be aware that new XP installations spend a lot of time on Windows Update, unless you tell it not to.

If you want to continue this discussion then provide a VM log file: Right click VM in GUI, select "Show Log", save "VBox.log" (only) to a file, ZIP THE FILE and attach here. Make sure the VM is shut down before you collect the log of the session.