Lately, I've been getting a little fed up with the poor performance I was getting out of my virtual machines in Virtual PC 2004 (which I still prefer compared to using Virtual Server 2005 R2 directly). Performance was particularly bad on VPC image with SQL Server 2005, which has a nasty tendency of constantly using the processor and eating a lot of memory even when it's not being used (and BizTalk 2006 somewhat aggravates the issue). I've obviously done the common things like defragging the disk.
While looking for clues as to what the problem might be, I ran into KB article 899525 "When you run Virtual PC 2004 on a portable computer that uses the Intel Centrino 950 chipset, Virtual PC Performance is reduced". As it turns out, my laptop does indeed use the 950 chipset, so I thought this might be one of the issues I was running into and proceeded to call PSS and ask for the hotfix.
After I installed the hotfix and restarted my virtual machines, I noticed that performance improved quite a bit inside the guest OS: SQL Workbench and Visual Studio 2005 seemed more responsive, and overall the machine felt just better. Unfortunately, this seems to have had a nasty side effect: Now Virtual PC will hog down 100% of the real machine's CPU time when a virtual machine is running, even if the machine is paused!
I'm not sure if this will be an acceptable compromise yet, will keep trying and see if I can improve things somewhat.
