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I'm considering retracting this post. I thought I had it figured out, but the slugishness has returned even though Aero is off. ;-(

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I’ve been fighting with my VPCs on my Vista laptop for some time now. They’ve been painfully sluggish, especially around the UI. I’m running a 64bit IBM T500 with 64bit Vista Business. Its a pretty powerful machine in my book and has a good enough video card profile that I can run the Aero.

Here’s my experience index:

image

 

Given those performance specs, I would think that my VPC would run just fine, but it didn’t. The UI in the VPC was painfully slow. My first guess was something to do with a 64bit / 32bit mismatch. I tried re-installing the virtual machine additions, but that didn’t help.

The key, as far as I can see so far appears to be the Aero theme. I wouldn’t think that the Aero theme on the host would impact the virtual machine, but it does. I changed the theme to “Windows Vista Basic” and all of a sudden the VPC is running like a champ!

So, as far as I can see, don’t use Aero if you are running virtual PCs.

Cheers!