am i expecting too much? win98 amazingly slow

Hello everyone,

I have a 1ghz amd, 512mb ram ubuntu linux box. I want to run win98 via parallels so i can get a few things done that require windows.

after installing windows 98 via parallels, then installing the parallels tools, i was amazed how slow everything ran. win98 was unusably slow. i had the ram set in parallels prefs to about 256, and the ram in the win98 virtual machine to around 160. plenty of ram for win98. but it still ran dog slow.

is my computer too slow? (i can't imagine this is the case b/c i've run win98 in virtual pc on a mac with a 333mhz g3 processor).

could there be some error in my setup?

is the slowness normal?

can anyone else chime in here about their experiences? comments from those with similar hardware would be greatly appreciated.

thanks,

takayuki

 

I have no experience with Parallels under linux but I would say that your memory is probably an issue.

If you have it available I would bump your machine up in RAM. Then give Parallels more RAM for the VM.

Mark

 

Did you choose Windows 98 as the guest host specifically? Also, try disconnecting the cd-rom from the virtual machine, that was causing me -really- bad slowdowns.
Just uncheck "connected" from the cd-rom settings and connect it when you insert a cd.

 

just within the usable range

David and Mark,

thanks for the replies.

Yes, i've got win98 selected as the host.

I upped the ram as much as i currently can, to 340mb.

I disconnected the cd-rom from the virtual machine.

And now it is just usable, which is a great improvement from before. i guess i need a faster cpu and more ram.

regards,

david

 

yes, you need more ram and higher speed CPU to have better performance. I guess the best hardware for Parallels now is the Core Duo, VT-x is optional but it will definately be a better option.

 

I am running XP on Suse 10.1 host on a 2.2GHz P4M with 2 Gig of ram. XP has 508 MB of RAM. It is resonable in speed when running MS Office, but I run two CAD programs on it, and It is dog slow when running these. 2.1 it was unuseable, 2.2, useable, but still a PITA.

Art

 

Interesting... I've run Solidwords in my XP VM under Mac OS X with very nice speed. My VM as 640mb assigned to it and even with other problems open, MS Office, Delphi, Solidworks it runs quite fast!

The only thing that is a little slow is disk access when compared to a real WinXP machine using a SATA drive.

Mark

 

i think with duo core processor and vt-x, you need lesser resources to achieve the same performance. Single core P4 or older CPUs should need more RAM to boost its performance.