Post your questions to the MSFT Virtualization team

pparks1 said:

James O'Neill said:

Kari said:

What would you VPC geeks recommend to speed up XP Mode? Assigning more RAM, or does it have any effect after 1 gig? What else?

Kari

My 3 rules for improving perf.
1. Add more RAM
2. Add more RAM
3. If there are any empty memory sockets , add RAM.

With XP mode it is always a compromise because adding memory to the VM takes it away from the host. So you need to balance VM performance against host performance.

The other thing which will make a difference is the type of virtual hard disk you use. By default XP-Mode creates differencing disk for each XP VM , a differencing disk is slower than a single disk, and if you have a single disk a Fixed disk is better quicker on writes than the a dynamically expanding disk .

Then the speed of the disk has an impact.

I'm a systems admin for a living with a considerable amount of experience with virtual machines...both stand-alone applications as well as hypervisor based products.

My only complaint with Windows XP Mode...is that it's terribly slow compared to other 3rd party products. While I understand where you are coming from with more RAM and faster hard drives...these aren't really necessary with the 3rd party products.

Yes. I too found that XP Mode is slower than others such as VMWare and VirtualBox.

pparks1 said:

fakeasdf said:

Are you talking about Virtual PC, or when you use applications from (XP/Win 7 etc) virtualized into the host environment?

You can have a look at this other thread to get the main point that I am making
XP Mode is slow--any way to improve

In a nutshell, the XP Mode while easy to install and use...but is considerably slower to boot and launch applications than running XP installed under VMWare Player 3.0 or Sun VirtualBox 3.x

Originally, I was very bummed because I wanted to make use of the activated copy of XP that I was entitled to when I purchased Windows 7 Ultimate. However, since that time, VMWare Player 3.0 has introduced the ability to convert that instance and use within VMWare Player 3.0 without violating the MS EULA...so I got what I wanted in the end.

Can VMWare Player 3.0 and Windows Virtual PC co-exist on the same machine?

Kari said:

polycue said:

Can VMWare Player 3.0 and Windows Virtual PC co-exist on the same machine?

You can have VMWare, Sun VirtulaBox and Virtual PC installed on the same machine at the same time, but you can only have one of those running on any given moment. When I want to run Mandriva Linux which I have installed on VirtualBox, I have to first shut down Virtual PC and XP Mode

Kari

Yeah, I tried running XP Mode and VirtualBox but a nasty error came up.

I enjoyed this Q & A with the MS people. We should shoot for that again for another topic or topics.

Win7User512 said:

I enjoyed this Q & A with the MS people. We should shoot for that again for another topic or topics.

True dat :)

OK, so I just now tried to get into my Virtual PC/XP Mode and got this error when clicking the "Windows XP Mode" icon...



Anybody know what's going on here. I haven't made any changes to the machine since installing it. And it initially worked, as I was posting about it here. Now for some odd reason it doesn't

If I click on the "Windows Virtual PC" icon, it takes me here.... C:\Users\MyName\Virtual Machines



...and clicking that link (windows xp mode.vmcx) gives the same error...

I'm thinking about doing a reinstall. However when I did attempt to do the uninstall, I was warned that the files on the VHD will also be removed. So I’d like to try going around that first.

Again, don’t know why the error since I’ve made no changes to the machine since installing the program.

Any suggestions on a fix?

Thanks.