SpeedSwitchXP and Virtual PC

A while ago I posted about issues that people have been seeing with Virtual PC and some of the advanced power management features on today's laptops. One solution that has been mentioned to me a number of times - but which I have never had the chance to investigate is SpeedSwitchXP. This is a neat little tool that allows you to change some of the Windows power management options that are not usually exposed under Windows.

On most systems - setting this tool to best performance will help Virtual PC immensely, with a relatively minor hit to the power consumption of the computer.

So if you are running Virtual PC on a laptop and seeing problems with slow performance, erratic performance or repeated keys inside the virtual machine - you may want to try running this tool on your host operating system.

Cheers,
Ben

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 18, 2006
  Before I installed the two "virtually undocumented" hotfixes, Virtual PC was a real dog on my new Dell CoreDuo laptop. Even after applying the patches I would get strange performance issues with all apps (not just Virtual PC). The final fix was to turn off ATI's PowerPlay feature in the Catalyst Control Center. Now everything is nice and snappy.
  
  P.S. - I love the blog and all of the tips. Keep up the good work.

• Anonymous
  July 18, 2006
    Thanks, Ben. That's a nice little utility. I ran it for a while with the graph turned on while I ran a few different tasks (including booting a VPC) with it set to dynamic switching. Interesting to watch the CPU switch up and down as required.  

• Anonymous
  July 19, 2006
  Personally I prefer NHC. http://www.pbus-167.com/chc.htm. Especially for undervolting :)

• Anonymous
  October 05, 2010
  so do you still check this site? I dont see any dates past 2006

• Anonymous
  October 06, 2010
  will - No, I do not need to use this tool with Windows Virtual PC.  But if you are running VPC 2004 / 2007 - the tool still works. Cheers, Ben