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I have a toshiba laptop with a samsung ssd 860 evo 500GB in which I have installed Windows 10 64 bits. This is the main hard drive. Also I have a second hard drive (not ssd) into an optical drive enclosure. I am using virtualbox and I have virtual box machines placed in the second hard drive.

When I run Windows 8.1 Pro x64 virtual machine as guest on my host windows 10 it is too slow. My laptop has 8GB RAM, and the virtual machine has 4GB assigned.

Why is my guest OS too slow? Any ideas to increase performance and make it faster?

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    How fast is the hard drive? A 5400-rpm HDD will be very slow. A 7200-rpm HDD should be workable. Try assigning 5 GB of memory to the host and 3 GB to the guest. Upgrade to 16 GB if you can. Upgrade to an SSD if you can. Start with more memory.
    – anon
    Commented Feb 4, 2021 at 19:26
  • @John Hard drive is 5400-rpm and laptop is an Intel Core i7-4710HQ
    – Willy
    Commented Feb 4, 2021 at 19:33
  • That is a major issue for virtual machines. 5400-rpm drives in my experience are slugs and I stopped using them 20 years ago. Upgrade the drive to an SSD drive (means reinstalling everything). Upgrade to 16 GB at the same time. Truly consider whether this is the time to get a newer, faster computer.
    – anon
    Commented Feb 4, 2021 at 19:35

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I suggest the following:

  • First, check if your processor has virtualization capabilities. Intel has VT-x and AMD has AMD-v.
  • Second, check if virtualization is enabled in the host BIOS.
  • Third, check if it is enabled in Virtualbox VM configuration.

Processor support will help a lot.

I also suggest disabling visual effects in the Guest OS. They may be trying to use GPU acceleration which is not present. Alternatively you can enable "3d acceleration" in the VM config and install Virtualbox guest additions in the Guest. My experience with that is limited and very old (it probably got better).

I hope this helps.

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  • My processar has virtualization capabilites Intel has VT-x. Also virtualization is enabled in the host BIOS, and also enabled in VirtualBox VM configuration. 3d acceleration enabled and guest additions installed in the guest.
    – Willy
    Commented Feb 4, 2021 at 20:30
  • My laptop has an intel hd graphics and also an AMD Radeon R9 m200x so is there any way to tell laptop explicitly to use AMD Radeon when using Virtualbox instead of intel hd graphics? Maybe it goes so faster?
    – Willy
    Commented Feb 5, 2021 at 8:45
  • Virtualbox has PCI Passthrough only on linux hosts. docs.oracle.com/en/virtualization/virtualbox/6.0/admin/…
    – Eduardo Bissi
    Commented Feb 5, 2021 at 13:00
  • Is you guest sluggish like even the mouse movement is slow or just when opening programs and files? You can try coping your VHD file to the SSD and check how speed changes.
    – Eduardo Bissi
    Commented Feb 5, 2021 at 13:06
  • No, it isn't. The mouse movement is perfect, it is faster. It only happens when opening programs and files and even task manager. Disk usage and cpu usage is almost 100%, normally, between, 70 and 100%.
    – Willy
    Commented Feb 5, 2021 at 14:32

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