virtualbox.org

Problem:
190 Important windows updates take ~10hours to install, then fail, then take ~10 hours to roll back. Tried 3x.
Now I'm doing 10 updates at a time, about 2.5hours each set.

Environment:
Win7 32 bit host, 64bit guest.
VirtualBox 5.0.14R105127
Intel Core Duo CPU

I tried:
-Reading everything Google could find.
-Got Settings set to 2 Processors, 100% Execution cap.
-Enable VT-x/AMD-V is checked.
-VTx hardware accel, and monitor accel are set in the BIOS.
-Installed the KB3102810 update.
-Rebooted a trillion times...been doing this for two weeks.

I can't find any new ideas via Google.

Anyone know how to get Win7 updates to actually work on VirtualBox?

Thanks,
Random

Are you assuming that this is a VirtualBox problem? How do you suppose that VirtualBox controls the speed of the Windows Update server without affecting other Internet stuff?

Have you Googled for people having similar issues on physical PCs?

As far as I know you just have to live with it. I doubt that MS will give you the time of day unless you use Win10.

I think I remembered that a 64-bit guest on a 32-bit host will be slower because of the extra switching the processor must do. Also, you are giving both cores you have on your host to your guest. Further, multiple processors in a guest may run slower on a process than a single processor in the guest, due to overhead the host needs to do to keep track of the instructions. Finally, with a 32-bit host, and Windows 7 on both host and guest, getting enough memory in the guest will be hard. Your guest might be a little squeezed and have to swap to the disk a lot, slowing down the process.

I would try temporarily reducing the Guest processor count to 1 (and keeping it that way as long as the host is a Duo). See if a fresh reboot and not allowing any other programs to start on the host besides Virtualbox (such as all the monitors and tray icon thingies that manufacturers like to bloat their systems with) might not allow you to start the guest with a bit more memory. 2GB would be good, more if you can squeeze it, until the updates are done.

While all of those things are important, and do contribute to poor performance, I doubt that all of those together could make Windows updates "unusably slow". Plus we've had other reports so we are pretty any issue is at the server end.