In article ,
Huge wrote:

Well, kinda. This whole thread arose out of the fact that I commented that
Windows 7 runs like a dog under VirtualBox on my Ubuntu Linux machine, which
is the aforementioned Inspiron 530. I had assumed it's because I don't have
enough memory; Ubuntu reports 3.2 GiB;

[snip]

This is with the W7 VBox fired up. VBox warns that there may not be enough
memory left for the host after assigning 1735 MB to the guest VM. But, I
notice that the CPU load is enormous - one core is pinned at 100% with
the other running at 30%, all the time, so I wonder if the problem is CPU
rather than memory? (It's a 3GHz Core2 Duo)


Could be Virtualbox - I run MacOS on a Macbook that is over 5 years old and
has a 2.0GHz Core2duo. With 4GB of RAM in the laptop I can run windows7 in
a VM under Vmware fusion it's ok (not swift, but usable for project and visio
which are the two things I want). Under virtualbox it's far less responsive.
Not used Virtualbox under Linux so might be a MacOS issue but...

Certainly it doesn't eat an entire CPU core.

Darren