On 09/01/2014 09:38, 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;

huge@amun:~$ free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3275 3143 132 0 139 364
-/+ buffers/cache: 2639 636
Swap: 3216 0 3216

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)


I find that Winodws 7 runs like a sloth on Valium with less than 2
gigabytes of RAM available to it on a real machine, and I doubt there's
any difference in that requirement when it's a VM. You may also have a
problem with multicore support in your VM hosting program. I know M$
*say* a Gig will do for Windows 7, but they also used to claim XP would
run in 512 megabytes, which hasn't been true since SP3 came out.

For what it's worth, my netbook has a 1.6 GHz processor and 2 Gig of
RAM, and even that siezes up for a few seconds from time to time under
certain programs. It's never actually crashed yet....

--
Tciao for Now!

John.