On vista with some fancy multi core machines… I’ve found that some OS’s will just DOG big time, inducing major latency, disk errors, and of course it’ll eventually corrupt the guest OS into not working.

As an instance, NT 3.1 takes about 30 minutes to install (compare to Qemu in about 2 minutes tops) and every time I’d try to convert the disk to NTFS it would either corrupt the disk so it couldn’t boot or it would fail saying the disk was unable to convert…

Anyways back when Virtual PC was a connectix product it was meant to run on a SINGLE CPU/CORE.  Back then multiproc machines were servers…  And who would be running Windows NT 4.0 server on a Windows NT 4.0 server??

Anyways the ‘fix’ here is to set Virtual PC’s affinity to a single core BEFORE you start any VM’s.  I’ve been setting mine to 0, but i suspect it doesn’t matter as long as no other VM’s have started before hand.  Anyways start up Virtual PC, then launch task manager, and set it’s affinity to a single core, then you’ll be good to go!

So far it would seem that Virtual Server is not hit by this, and I have to wonder if you install Virtual server onto a machine running Virtual PC with the new ‘core’ would it work correctly…..?

Anyways this fix is good enough for me.  It’s nice to boot up in a few seconds.