VirtualBox & VMware

[Epy]

Just wondering if anyone here has tried VirtualBox on Windows 7 (as a host). I have tried a few times and it's been beyond slow, which is strange because it was faster when I had Linux or XP as the host.

Anyway, I tried VMware Player for the first time as a last resort and it's about twice as fast as VirtualBox...on my machine anyway. Anyone have a similar experience, or know how to speed VirtualBox up on Windows 7?

[Mario F.]

I've tried both on Windows and Linux in fact. And my own final conclusion was that I'd want VMware on Windows and VirtualBox on Linux.

Regarding VirtualBox on Windows, I had some problems with it. Slow response wasn't so much an issue I can remember. Maybe there's something wrong with your setup. But it would crash sometimes and the Virtual Box menus will often misbehave on dual monitor setups when your virtual machine is on the secondary monitor in fullscreen mode. VMware always ran without an hitch. Conversely, VirtualBox was far superior on my Linux host where it works like a charm.

[Epy]

Yeah, I haven't tried VMware on Linux yet. It's very disappointing because VirtualBox has worked very nicely for me up until this point.

[jdragyn]

I have been using VirtualBox for a little over a year now on Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit on 2 machines. One machine I built (AMD Athlon II X3 @ 2.9Ghz, 4GB RAM), the other is a laptop (AMD Phenom II X3 @ 3.0Ghz, 4GB RAM).

I have installed XP on each (each with 1 processor allocated and 1GB RAM) and, aside from an hour of hunting for how to get the host integration to work properly, it has been flawless on both. I have a few games that either won't run or won't run properly in Win7 for some reason, but they run in VirtualBox XP the same as they did on my old machines with XP only.

I have also played around with a few other OS's, got Win98SE to work on a lark (that one's a pain in the butt), and have tried a few flavors of linux, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, etc. These were mostly for experimentation, i've never actually run a machine dedicated to a linux OS so I can't really comment except to say that the Ubuntu experience was pretty good.

I do once in a while have an issue in VB-XP when I open a folder with a lot of pictures, and the folder is set to show thumbnails. XP's explorer.exe will freeze up but I can continue to surf in Firefox or Chrome, and run other programs, so it feels like an XP issue, not a VirtualBox issue.