virtial box vs virtual pc 2007

I was using virtual pc 2007 (not the latest version as didnt want XP mode) and found it fine, fairly fast and easy to use. However no 64bit which I needed.

So downloaded virtualbox which has some nice features such as sata emulation, 64bit amongst other things. My main problem is that it slows down the host system to the point using it whilst playing a video clip makes the clip stutter and this is on a quad core i5 machine. On top of this the VM also feels slower dispite been so hard on the host system. I had to throttle the virtualbox to just 1 core and still get some stutters, on 2-4 cores its quite bad. 3 cores can saturate all 4 real cores.

I have vt-x on
vt-d off (slows down host i/o)
nested pageing off as this is i7 and above only.
sata emulation with host i/o cache off
currently VM has 2 gig of ram and previously was 0.5gig, both same affects.
nothing is been swapped out as I have 8 gig of real ram.

do others have a problem with virtualbox hitting the host hard?

Never had a problem with VBox, although I've not used it under Windows, just under Ubuntu.

Did you install Guest Additions ??

Virtual Box - Can install any OS on it. (Requires VT-x support)
Virtual PC - Can only install Windows OS on it. (Does not require VT-x support)

Virtual Box is an easy program to use.

guest additions is only for windows OS I think, I am using freebsd on it.

virtual pc can run non windows OS also. at least virtual pc 2007 can.

Got that mixed up. Keep getting confused with Virtual PC and Windows Xp Mode.

VirtualBox has 3d acceleration (OpenGL and DirectX8), last time I checked (and the reason I don't use it), XP mode dosent support 3d acceleration.

nope thanks for letting me know.

when the VM is idle my host pc doesnt struggle although does have higher than normal idle cpu usage (also didnt happen in virtual pc).

its mainly when doing things like compiling, and even tho the host pc cpu isnt saturated it makes videos stutter.

will report back on how 4.0 goes (assuming I can upgrade to it with existing VM).

I think its worth mentioning that virtual pc 2007 doesnt requre vt-x. Microsoft only added that requirement to the latest version.

--edit--

changelog looks very nice so far.

Resource control: added support for limiting a VM’s CPU time and IO bandwidth

im sold

4.0 so far seems worse. I tried the resource limit stuff but appears to not work at all. On this one tho even when I throttle 1 cpu in the VM I get worse symptons, my mouse pointer in windows pauses at the same time as video stutters so now my entire system gets pauses instead of just video clips.

I get the impression most users of virtualbox run it on linux rather than windows so thats what its optimised for.

what is effective is using cpu affinity to lock virtualbox to only one core.