- Posted by justin on October 10, 2005
I decided to consolidate the Virtual PC tips post that I have made lately.
Differencing Disk:
- Will greatly save on disk space.
- Remember to make base image read-only as making changes to it, may/most likely will render any child images unusable.
Performance Tuning
- Tell WinXp/2003 to tune for best performance instead of letting windows decide.
- It is best to have the virtual hard disk on a 2nd hard drive, this way the host OS and guest OS are not fighting for disk I/O.
- Defrag both the host OS and guest OS.
- Close as many applications on the host os as possible when running the virtual pc. If you don’t need Outlook open or SQL Server running on the host OS, then close outlook and turn off SQL Server.
- Don't allocate too much memory to the virtual pc. a 50/50 split on the laptop seems to work pretty good.
- You will want at least 1 gig of memory on the host computer to get a decent performance from Virtual PC.
- Turn off the Virtual PC sound, serial ports, floppy disk, and any other device that you are not going to be using.
Image Sizing
Virus Scan
- Virus Scan engines are not able to actually scan the virtual hard disk for virus. Therefore it is best to install a virus scanner on the guest OS and tell the host OS virus scanner to ignore the Virtual PC files. http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2005/09/14/466291
- The one change from the web site I would make it to specify the exact files to ignore instead of just the extensions. If is safer that way.
Virtual Machine Additions
- Make to always install the additions. They include stability and performance enhancements that greatly increase the usability of virtual pc.
Service Packs
- There is a sevice pack 1 for both Virtual Pc and Virtual Server. You will want to install both of these service packs.
Additional Links: