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By 'renicing' Virtual PC, I boosted XP quite a bit.
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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983
T h e R o a d L e s s T r a v e l e d
Simple ways to speed up Windows XP in Virtual PC
Dec. 1, 2004
By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, The Post-Standard
I've found some easy ways to speed up my virtual Windows XP computer -- the one that runs inside my OS X Macintosh. You can do the same thing in a a half hour or so at no cost.
The first speed-up method is plain old common sense. After I installed the latest version of Microsoft's Virtual PC with Windows XP included, I got rid of all the Windows stuff I don't need. I opened the Control Panel and used the "Add-Remove Programs" applet to remove parts of Windows. (Microsoft calls them "components" as if they were parts of your stereo system. But it means the same thing.)
I took out all the games, screen savers and desktop backgrounds. I removed unwanted services and turned off ones that I might need at some point. (Go to www.blackviper.com for help deciding how to deal with Windows services.) I got rid of most of the Accessories. (They're not needed when Windows is merely a program running on your Mac.)
I even tried slimming Windows XP by running the free version of a Windows pare-down utility named XP Lite, from www.litepc.com. All I got for my trouble was a wounded Windows. Some of the programs I had installed in Windows stopped working right, so I deleted that copy of Windows and restored my backup copy. (Virtual PC stores everything -- including Windows and its C: drive -- in a single package file. Copy that file to another folder and you have a backup.)
Then I turned on disk compression in Windows XP Pro. (You get to it by right clicking or Ctrl-Clicking on the C: drive and choosing "Properties.") My idea was to clear out enough space for photo editing in Windows; large digital photos take u a lot of space.
That worked nicely, paring the entire C: drive down to a 2.68 gigabyte file -- one that will easily fit onto a blank data DVD, even when I've added a lot of files to my virtual Windows computer.
Note that my 2.68 GB Windows installation isn't a skeleton system. It includes a dozen photo-editing programs, a modern anti-virus program, a next-generation spyware catcher from www.sunbelt-software.com and a lot of Windows utilities. Yet XP's disk compression was able to squeeze everything down to less than 3 gigabytes.
Now for the icing on that cake I just made. I installed a free OS X utility called "sterRenice" -- the spelling is indeed odd -- to do only one task: When Virtual PC is running, sterRenice raises the priority of the Virtual PC process. OS X then gives more processor time to Virtual PC. I didn't see any miracles take place, but I'd guess that Windows XP gets a 20 percent speed boost from sterRenice. (Get sterRenice utility from www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/24970).
The utility gets its name from the way Unix computers work. In OS X Macs, as in all other Unix computers, all processes are supposed to be "nice" to their fellow tasks. If they want to be very nice and give some of their processing time away, they have a positive "nice" value. If they want to be mean or just plain not nice, they have a begative "nice" value.
Anyone with sufficient rights can change the "nice" value of any process by "renicing" it. And that's what sterRenice does, using a slider. You pick the program you want to renice from a list, then slide the value leftward, into negative territory. or rightward into positive land. REMEMBER: Negative "niceness" gives more processor time to that process. So to speed up Virtual PC, you'd assign it a negative "niceness" value. I use -10, but try any number you want.
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