I wrote: : My XP installation under VMware is running incredibly slowly. The : second hand on the XP "date and clock" is taking several seconds to : move 1 secoond! : : Here's my installation, in brief: : -- Fresh install of FC6 (respin DVD) on a clean Dell Precision M70 laptop. : -- The machine has the nVidia "Quadro FX Go1400" video processor in it. : -- All FC6 updates as of yesterday (186 of them). : -- 2.6.19.1-2911 kernel, and opensource "nv" driver : -- Fresh install of VMwareWorkstation-5.5.3 : : VMware itself comes up fine, : but XP starts and runs _really_really_really_ slowly. : : Does anyone have a clue? I am stumped. : : Dean : I found the problem. It is an interaction (that I don't understand) between Windows (or is it VMware itself?) and the sleep states of the laptop and kernel. The sledgehammer fix is "acpi=off" in the boot parms---not very nice if you want to suspend your laptop. The more elegant solution is: echo 1 > /sys/module/processor/parameters/max_cstate This is supposed to keep the kernel from leaving sleep state "C1". I don't really understand this or what the implications are but (as they say) "It worked!" This seems to be an all-too-common problem, as I learned by spending a couple of hours reading on the VMware list. And its an old problem. There are messages dating back to 2004 where people experience mysterious dog-slow operation of Windows under VMware. To see if you "have it" do Control panel --> Date and Time in Windows and watch the second hand of the clock. If it is ticking once every 10-30 wall seconds then this is evidently the cause of your problem. Here's a link to a long discussion (spanning 1.5 years) of this: <http://www.vmware.com/community/message.jspa?messageID=389920&tstart=50> Many of the proposed solutions are worthless. DPlatt's remarks are the helpful ones. Read them Dean
