Should I be able to install Virtual PC without my laptop grinding to a halt?

Question

As much out of curiosity as anything else, a few weeks ago I installed Virtual PC on my old ThinkPad T41 and although I only set up a single W2K VM and have hardly touched it since, I've noticed that the machine is now much less responsive.

I've eliminated the possibility that malware is causing the problem, it really does seem to stem from the time I installed VPC.

Should Virtual PC cause this? I notice there is a bug that makes it difficult to remove (not very confidence-inspiring...) so I need to look into that so I can uninstall and see it it makes any difference. However, Windows being Windows I'm not 100% convinced that an uninstall may undo whatever VPC seems to have done.

Answer 1

Your CPU doesn't support hardware virtualization, so Virtual PC just sits on the application layer like any other program. Installing it shouldn't have caused any performance problems (beyond the usual contribution to Windows rot, I mean), and I certainly can't think of any reason why it would have an effect when it's not even running.

Check to see if the "Virtual PC.exe" process is present in the Processes tab of Task Manager when VPC isn't running. If it's not there, it's probably either coincidence or the result of some kind of installation error.

Answer 2

VM's share all the hardware components of your system so when a vm is running there's two systems accessing your hardware instead of one. I personally didn't get into VMs until I had atleast a dual-core system and lots of RAM. A better configuration would be to have two harddrives as well. One harddrive that's devoted to VMs and the other for the host operating system.

W2k is pretty lightweight relative to these days but running it in a VM on a T41 will probably slow the T41 down considerably.