Sped up Virtual Machine (Virtualbox)

[pandaroso]

I have a desktop on which I run an Oracle VM VirtualBox (v 5.2).The Virtual Box runs Win7 and is extremely slow. e.g. upon clicking on Windows logo, Windows menu takes half a second to open.

I would like to speed it up. Slowness is related to the host and not to OS installed on the VM, as it is slow while booting the VM as well. e.g. it takes over a second to display the text on the Windows Recovery Error one often sees before booting Windows (when not shut down correctly).

Desktop runs Win7 on a 4th Gen i7 quad-core with 32gb RAM and a 1060 GTX GPU.

Virtual Box settings are:
- 8GB
- Enable I/O APIC
- 4 cores
- Execution Cap 100%
- Harware Virtualization enabled (enabled VT-x/AMD-V, enabled Nested paging)
- Video Memory maxed out (128MB)

Some recommended settings for improving VM performance are:
- Fixed size disk (done)
- Exclude VM directories in antivirus (done)
- Enable Intel VT-x or AMD-V (done)
- Allocate more memory (8gb should be more than enough)
- Allocate more cores (4 cores should be more than enough - allocating 1 or 2 cores makes no difference)
- Put files on SSD (not done)
- Improve Performance Inside VM (not applicable as slow before booing into Win7)

Would anyone have any suggestions? I've run out of ideas. Thank you very much.

 

[n0ns3ns3]

well, obviously SSD greatly improve things.
turning off eye candy on the guest improves things.
Hopefully you checked the BIOS that VT-x/VT-d enabled.

 

[pandaroso]

well, obviously SSD greatly improve things.
turning off eye candy on the guest improves things.
Hopefully you checked the BIOS that VT-x/VT-d enabled.

Thank you. Issue is this goes beyond tweaking here and there. A VM like this, with a bare bones Win7 guest, on a desktop like this and 8gb Ram + 4 cores should fly. There's something very wrong but my troubleshooting is not yielding any discoveries.