Adventures with my new Vaio
So I bought a new laptop. Sony Vaio E Series Model VPCEB17FG.
Its a gorgeous machine and I am hoping to get 2-3 years quality life out of the thing. It comes with Windows7 and I decided to at least give Win7 a fair go. Unfortunately even with 4gb ram, this feels slower than my wife's nearly 2 year old Macbook with half the ram. What the hell?
Now, Win7 fans, everybody tells me its not that bad, but how come my XP VM runs so slowly compared to the same thing on the Macbook? On the Macbook, the XP VM had 1.2gb ram, but because I have more memory now, I have allocated 2.5gb to it.
Now, applications seem unresponsive and database access seems much more sluggish. I am running some mysql databases on the vm and application access to the database seems markedly slower. Not 10 or 20%, but 5 or 10 times slower. Again, what the hell??
My current theory is that the Windows XP VM on Windows 7 is to blame because effectively I am running 2 antiviruses, 2 anti spyware / malware and ultimately a bunch of services that I don't need all competing for disk access. I think that disk activity under win7 is more pronounced than with OSX. I could be wrong, but until I hear a better theory, that's my story and I am sticking with it.
I have setup dual-boot with Ubuntu Lucid Beta as I try and test the alternative. Once I find a working setup I'll reload another linux like opensuse, mandriva or fedora to run my vm on. Its just a lot easier to set ubuntu up with multiple kernels at this point. My Vaio has a Marvell ethernet card which currently has flaky support in kernel 2.6.32.
Its a gorgeous machine and I am hoping to get 2-3 years quality life out of the thing. It comes with Windows7 and I decided to at least give Win7 a fair go. Unfortunately even with 4gb ram, this feels slower than my wife's nearly 2 year old Macbook with half the ram. What the hell?
Now, Win7 fans, everybody tells me its not that bad, but how come my XP VM runs so slowly compared to the same thing on the Macbook? On the Macbook, the XP VM had 1.2gb ram, but because I have more memory now, I have allocated 2.5gb to it.
Now, applications seem unresponsive and database access seems much more sluggish. I am running some mysql databases on the vm and application access to the database seems markedly slower. Not 10 or 20%, but 5 or 10 times slower. Again, what the hell??
My current theory is that the Windows XP VM on Windows 7 is to blame because effectively I am running 2 antiviruses, 2 anti spyware / malware and ultimately a bunch of services that I don't need all competing for disk access. I think that disk activity under win7 is more pronounced than with OSX. I could be wrong, but until I hear a better theory, that's my story and I am sticking with it.
I have setup dual-boot with Ubuntu Lucid Beta as I try and test the alternative. Once I find a working setup I'll reload another linux like opensuse, mandriva or fedora to run my vm on. Its just a lot easier to set ubuntu up with multiple kernels at this point. My Vaio has a Marvell ethernet card which currently has flaky support in kernel 2.6.32.
Comments