Why are virtual machines always so slow?

I'm not entirely sure what you are seeing, or why. In my environment, my VM's are always quite speedy. In fact, they boot up and shut down was faster than my physical machine. Overall, they are a tad bit slower than the physical machine when it comes to running a CPU intensive application....but i believe that a majority of this is caused by the weaker simulated hardware devices that the VM uses. My experience has been the same with XP Mode, Virtual Box and VMWare Player 3.x.

For me, I normally run my VM's on these machines;
--Laptop with Pentium Core 2 Duo P8600 at 2.4Ghz with 4GB of RAM.
--Desktop with Pentium Core 2 Duo E8400 at 3.6Ghz with 8GB of RAM.
--Desktop with Pentium Core 2 Quad Q9400 at 2.66Ghz with 8GB of RAM.
--Desktop with Pentium Core 2 Quad Q9550 at 3.2Ghz with 8GB of RAM.

One thing to make sure of is that you install the products "tools". VirtualBox calls them "Virtual Machine Additions" and VMware calls it "Vmware tools". These will certainly improve the performance of the VM.

Also, be sure to set your expectations right. You aren't going to be able to setup a Virtual XP machine for hardcore gaming. The video subsystem simply won't be able to handle it. But to setup a Virtual XP machine to surf the web to avoid malware from your physical machine should be just fine.

It depends on how much of your CPU (including cores, if you have a multi-core CPU) and RAM you allocate. I have an AMD Phenom II X4 @ 3.0 GHz and 4GB of RAM and I can run 4 VMs at once. Of course, it also depends on what you're running. Virtualizing XP doesn't take much of a resource, but Windows 7 is a different story.

I have no complaints about Ubuntu in vBox. I run it on a 2.5GHz Duo Core and a 2.4GHz Quad. But both systems have SSDs - maybe that makes a difference. I have, of course, the guest additions.

The Chromium on Ubuntu is just as fast as Chrome on Windows7 native. Also other operations are quite fluent. At the time I was also running Win7 Beta in vBox and was very pleased with the performance.

Your 1.3 GHz low power CPU is unusual - even was 2 years ago. Is that a Netbook?

McDougal said:

Its sort of like a netbook, I'd call it halfway between a netbook and a laptop. Its got a 12.1" sized screen, so the form factor is like a netbook, except its far more powerful than one, it runs Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit pretty fast....

I would say that if you replaced the HDD with a 120GB SSD, you would get better results.