On Fri, 14 Aug 2009 11:19:06 +0100, Invisible wrote:

>>> OTOH, last time I tried to set up a virtual machine, it took two days
>>> just to install Windows XP and update to service pack 3. That's quite
>>> absurdly slow...
>> 
>> You need better hardware.  It should never take that much time to
>> install an OS - in my VMs, it never took that long....
>> 
>> What specs on the machine (including host OS)?
> 
>  From memory, it was a 4 GHz Pentium IV with 512 MB RAM, running QEMU.
> 
> (The laptops I'm looking at using are this spec or worse.)

Memory would be the issue here, no wonder it took forever to install, it 
was probably swapping fiercely.

For good virtualization, you really need to have at least 1 or 2 GB of 
memory.  Insufficient host memory can lead to serious performance 
problems.

Jim

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