CPU usage at 100% on guest and slow

[lshanker]

I just got a MacBook Pro and I'm trying to run windows 7 in VB. It works but its really slow and CPU stays at 100% in windows, on OSX cpu usage is normal. I looked online for solutions but nothing works so far. I've tried disabling nesting pages, enabling 2d and 3d acceleration, and adding more memory. I'm not sure where to go from here.

[mpack]

It is normal for new Windows installations to be slow - during that time they are checking for updates, indexing the disk, etc.

Other possibilities are that you have overcommitted RAM or CPU resources on your PC, but I'd need a log file before I can discuss that. With the VM fully shut down, right click it in GUI. Select "Show Log" and save "VBox.log" (ONLY) to a zip file. Attach the zip here.

[lshanker]

I hope its just the new installation. Thank you for the reply, here's the log.

[mpack]

Are you running Windows 7 off an external drive? That alone could make it slow. Very slow. 32bit Win7 pages almost constantly, and otherwise fiddles with the drive almost constantly. It's very annoying when you are working next to a physical Win7 with a noisy hdd. If the drive was slow then it would be intolerable to use. Any USB2 drive will be slow. It's harder to say with USB3 - a fast bus doesn't guarantee fast writes.

On a separate issue, you still have what I assume is the installer DVD mounted in the drive.

[lshanker]

Yeah I am, even if its an external SSD? Speeds are pretty decent on it and it seemed to run windows fine off the school computers.

Oh yeah I should probably eject that.

[mpack]

"SSD" covers a lot of territory. There is no way for me to know from here how fast your drive is. Plus if you plug it into a USB2 port or hub then it can't go faster than the USB2 bus allows.

[lshanker]

My drive is a Samsung T1 Portable 250GB USB 3.0 External SSD, it won't let me post a link, and its plugged into a usb 3.0.

I think when I benchmarked it last it was over 380mb/s read and write

I'll try re-installing windows and run off the host storage and see if it makes a difference.

[mpack]

I'll try re-installing windows...

Don't. That will just start the "new installation" stuff from scratch again, plus I assume you've already activated.

You can simply move the existing VM: Howto: Move a VM.

You could also try allocating two CPUs to the VM (but no more). That might make it less laggy if the problem is lots of I/O.

[Perryg]

If I may. I have tested several USB3 devices and they are all near or exceeding eSATA speed depending on the device so I doubt that is the actual cause of the slowdown.