I've got a machine with 4 GB of RAM running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit.
Unfortunately I have to run Visual Studio in the XP Mode VPC, and it's quite the dog. Aside from giving the VPC more RAM (what's an optimal amount?) does anyone have any suggestions for speeding it up?
Best Answer
Revisiting this question - the best thing that you can do for this is to run your VM off of a solid-state drive.
Adding an SSD to my system (OCZ Vertex 3) dropped compilation times by 80%. The problem is that Visual Studio is very intense in disk accesses, and when running a VM, this is a big problem (since the VM is just one giant file).
Looking at the disk queues in resource monitor, the difference was apparent. With a 7200 RPM drive, the queue was stacked at over 300 queued requests during compilations. With an SSD, the queue never went above 5 requests.
Would highly recommend an SSD for anyone else in this situation.