XP in VM

[Shibblet]

I downloaded Virtual Machine from the Ubuntu supp... (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/suppository)repository. :p

Decided to load up XP in it, and to my wonderment, it seems to run faster than an actual install of XP! I am going to try Vista next, but...

How is this even possible?

[Pnuts]

maybe because its a clean installation? That is the only thing I can think of that would let it run faster short of the original installation lacking needed drivers to run optimally.

-Pnuts

[HermanAB]

I have seen the same thing - the VM boots up faster than a native Xp version, but it runs a little slower.

[veloce]

Due to a combination of my vm XPs being less "cluttered" and Linux' far superior SMP abilities, I get better than native performance with my vms running Excel (2003) models.

I suspect performance will be very task specific.

I would be interested in the difference between native Excel 2007 - which support multiple cores - and the vms running Excel 2007. (I found that giving the vm multiple cores slowed things down - better to let Linux handle the extra cores.)