Virtual PC high CPU usage problems

Question

I run VPC 2007 on my Vista business laptop with 4 gig RAM. I use VPC to run windows XP and maintain a VS2003 web project. At first everything was great. I assigned the VPC 512MB and did my work as usual. I also run Resharper and Visual SVN. Lately, the act of scrolling in a page causes the CPU to spike above 50, sometimes near 100. This freezes my machine occasionally and is frustrating. Typing code sometimes does the same thing.

I have experimented with changing allocated memory, disk space, turning on/off the paging file, uninstalling ReSharper and Visual SVN. There should be no reason this thing is slow with all the memory I have on this laptop! I don't have anything running on it but VPC at any one time.

I'm wondering if I should just install VS2003 on my Vista machine and deal with any incompatibility problems.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Try VirtualBox.

VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Answer 2

If it were me, I'd run the VS.NET 2003 IDE on Vista natively. Just check out this page with the problems you might have:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vs2005/bb188244.aspx

As far as your CPU goes, it could be a video driver/display issue. Have you tried turning Aero Glass on/off on your vista machine to see if that changes things? Are your number of colors for your desktop the same both in the VPC and on your host? Have you updated your video drivers recently?

Answer 3

I recommend VirtualBox. Every time I use VPC I soon give up because the performance is terrible. I run VirtualBox with a Vista virtual PC allocated 1.5gb ram and it runs really well. In fact I don't really notice much slow down from running natively.

Answer 4

I'd bet VisualSVN is the problem. I had the same problem on a dual-core system with 6GB of RAM. I eventually just uninstalled it because it kept crashing the IDE.

BTW, I'm running Server2003 64-bit.

Answer 5

First thing I'd suggest doing is run Process Explorer and Process Monitor to find out whats really eating the cpu. If it used to run fine, switching to another VM might not fix anything.

Answer 6

I have a similar problem and found this helps a lot:

Download Hotfix Rollup Package For Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 SP1