Huge wrote:

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.

Win7 64bit on this physical machine needs just over 1GB to get out of
bed with no apps running, I'd expect it to be dog slow with 2GB.

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)

That sounds more like a virtualisation/hardware emulation issue than not
enough CPU horsepower, I'm more familiar with hosting VirtualBox on
Windows than on Linux, have you got all the relevant drivers installed
in the guest? any different if Win7 uses a classic/basic theme rather
than an aero theme? Are you using guest addition to "pass" the 3D GPU
hardware into the VM?