Vista - Is this a Vista or VPC problem?

I have a new laptop with Vista Home Premium 64-bit (SP1) and my VPC installed
fine, the Win2K installed into VPC nicely (as it did on my old Win XP Pro
machine) but there is considerable "jerkiness" in the guest OS.

If I select something like a movie clip, the media player starts up fine,
but then the whole clip is just a series of still shots interspersed with
hacked-up sound. Mouse movement will halt minutely as I move the pointer
across the screen, and other signs of 'something' taking up CPU time.
Explorer windows will open, but then stutter as files populate the panels in
bursts.

The Program manager shows nothing I would really call a cycle stealer on
either the guest OR the host. The host has a Intel Pentium Dual T3200 @
2Ghz/2Ghz and 4GB of RAM. I have 1G allocated to the Guest. This will happen
with nothing running on the host (other than background tasks).

As this is my first experience with Vista (but I have been 'into computers'
for over 45 years) I am momentarily at a loss to explain why VPC runs the
guest so sluggishly.

GP

On Thu, 30 Oct 2008 08:23:00 -0700, Grand_Poohbah
<GrandPoohbah@xxxxxx> wrote:
Did you install the Virtual Machine Additions in the guest?


--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)

"Bo Berglund" wrote:
Sorry, Bo, I should have added that I did install the additions. I can move
items freely between guest and host (but even then the action is choppy).

GP

>>And, I should also add that the video chipset is an Intel 4 Series
Express Mobile with up to date drivers.

GP

--->Oh, yeah. Most of my early time was spent on DG's Nova's and
SuperNovas, but DEC mainframes had a large part of my life also.

I went into the Navy in 1962 and worked with Grace Hopper at the NRL for
a bit, then moved onward to more operational programs within the Naval
Security Group.

GP

"Grand_Poohbah" <GrandPoohbah@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:C8C292F3-88FA-4B32-967D-CFA80242FE73@xxxxxxWell, VPC is not really suited to watching videos in the guest. You should
be doing that in Vista, as the VPC video card is pretty lame.

However, jerky mouse movement and other "stutters" indicate something else
is wrong. Did you enable Hardware Virtualization? I daily run 2 copies
of XP and a Server 2003 running SQL Server 2005 in VPC on this Vista 64
system. I have 4 GB RAM and 2.4 Ghz Core 2 Quad system. Performance is
excellent, but I have to admit I haven't tried watching a video in the
guest. I just assumed it wouldn't work well due to the weak video card
that VPC presents to the guest OS.

--->Hardware virtualization is greyed-out on my copy here. Is that
something that needs to be enabled in CMOS originally?

I only checked a video after all the other things started stuttering. I
realize that the video card is really lame - but I do know how to add
another 8Mb to it. Haven't done it yet, but maybe that will help.

GP

"Grand_Poobah" <whatever@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:%231xA6dsOJHA.3748@xxxxxxYes, it is a BIOS option, and every machine I have that has it (4) it was
disabled by default. You have to manually enable it AND power down and
back on to enable it. The CPU needs a full reset to enable it.
Cool. How do you do that?

--->Aha! I will do that right now and report back.

You can add another 8Mb of video RAM by editing the VMC file for that
machine. You search the XML for the phrase 'video_adaptor' and change
the value of "8" to "16". You can't go higher than that though.

GP

--->Rats. "Intel Virtualization Technology" is greyed out in the BIOS. The
BIOS is "InsydeH2O" version 3.5 and apparently doesn't allow
virtualization for some reason.

GP