Windows 10 Upgrade (Part 4)

 

VMware Player And Disk Thrashing

The upgrades to Windows 10 are progressing at a smooth rate. With that said, there are things that have to be taken into consideration when performing a OS upgrade. The most important aspect is maintain good performance. Students won't want to use a slow computer. Neither do I!

VMware Player And The Demise of Virtual PC
When we got our computers, they came with WinXP Mode. XP Mode is a compatibility layer provided via virtual machine for older applications that refuse to run on 64-bit Windows 7. These programs are usually 16-bit Windows programs designed for Windows 3.1 or Windows 95/98. Applications that can't run on 64-bit Windows because these systems don't include the 16-bit subsystem for these programs to run.

A huge chunk of the software that our students use are these older programs that refuse to run natively on 64-bit Windows. These programs for the most part run without issue on XP Mode. XP Mode virtualization is provided via Windows Virtual PC. Windows Virtual PC is a virtualizer that is a more updated version of MS Virtual PC, which in itself came from a product simply called Virtual PC. Microsoft acquired the product after purchasing Connectix, the original creators, many moons ago in 2003. It was a product that I really loved in the past, but I admit that much of that love isn't there anymore.

Windows Virtual PC can actually run Windows 95 and 98 as well still. However, in my opinion, this product is a shell of it's former self. For the longest of times, this very powerful product that's capable of so many different uses was only marketed as a way for web-developers to test websites on older versions of IE via VM's and nothing more. Essentially, a glorified IE shell. Whoopie-do!

Currently, VMware Player is my go-to VM solution. It's very capable with the ability to virtualize a very modern PC using your hardware. It can use USB devices and provides 3D acceleration for virtual machines as well with a supported GPU. On my home computer, 3D acceleration is provided by the Nvidia GTX 950 which works very well.

For the lab computers though, 3D acceleration won't be needed though. In fact, my XP VM is very lean. It's the base install with Service Pack 3 installed along with the educational programs for the students to use. Many of them are from the Windows 3.1/95 days that refuse to run on 64-bit Windows. Originally, the VM had 768MB's of RAM allocated to it. However, memory allocations changed following the Windows 10 install.

When I installed VMware on the students computers many years ago, I encountered many issues. VMware Player ran as slow as molasses when virtualization was enabled on the computers. Playing around with the various settings within Player regarding the type of virtualization used didn't change anything. Things didn't get much better until I disabled virtualization in the BIOS, and set the VM engine to software.

While the performance wasn't stellar, it wasn't bad either. When it was launched in 2001, XP was designated for computers equipped with Pentium 2 and 3 processors running between 300-600MHz, so running on a quad-core system where a single core is operating at 3GHz is still much faster than what XP expected, despite it running using the software engine.

Also, we were running educational software anyway in the lab, not reliving late 90's/early 2000's gaming nostalgia by running GTA Vice City, Counter-Strike, or Unreal anyway (Those games should actually run fine natively on Windows 10 though if VM memory allocation is at a premium). Things have been very smooth.

With the Windows 10 upgrade, the virtualization option in the BIOS now functions the way that it was intended. I went back into the BIOS and re-enabled virtualization.The XP VM refused to run without it.VMware Player needed to be reinstalled, as the program didn't survive the upgrade.  The XP VM ran much better as a result after the install.

However, there was now two new issues. Because Windows 10 uses more memory and system resources than 7 did, I needed to cut back on the amount of memory allocated to the XP VM. Also, there is a lot more disk thrashing from Windows 10 combined with the thrashing when Player loads the memory save state when resuming XP.  When the VM was suspended, the 768 MB's allocated to the VM is written to a file that could then resumed from at a later date. Not surprisingly, the size of the file was the same as the memory allocation: 768 MB's. With Windows 7, this wasn't really a issue because once the host OS loaded, there was a lot less disk activity. Also, Windows 7 had lower memory overhead then 10. However, for Windows 10, reloading the VM save state from a large file takes significantly longer as there's significantly more disk thrashing from the host OS now. 

To combat this, I decreased the memory allocation of the XP VM in half from 768 MB's to 384 MB's. XP still runs smoothly, even with the reduced memory. Again, where just running educational programs from the Windows days of old, not GTA III or Half-Life. Despite this though, I wasn't happy with reducing the memory allocation. These computer might get a memory upgrade in the future though. The student computers have 4GB's of memory to play with currently.

There is something very important that has to be done when dealing with virtualization. Often times, anti-virus software provides protection to the VM as well. However, the VM takes a very massive performance hit when protection is enabled. The Windows XP guest  takes several minutes to load, and the desktop loading is as slow as watching paint dry. For the love of God, disable "Enable hardware-assisted virtualization" if your running the Avast Anti-Virus (or there equivalents in the other anti-virus programs) . Chances are that XP is already running behind a secure setup anyway. The XP VM needed for compatibility is unusable as long as this setting is enabled.

Within Avast, click Menu\Settings and click the search button. Type "virt" and the option for "Enable hardware-assisted virtualization" shows up. Un-check the box, and then restart the computer (the change won't be applied til then). After that, the VM should be running much faster.

Final Thoughts And Concerns
As a whole, the Windows 10 upgrade has been very straight-forward and surprisingly trouble-free. I am learning more about Windows 10. I am mostly comfortable with it. With that said, more research and fine-tuning needs to be done in order to get the most out of this upgrade and the computers that it's running on within the educational setting. I'm going to take a few weeks pause from these Windows 10 articles to focus on other projects and programs. With that mentioned, the next article in the series in focus on trying to reduce disk thrashing and disabling Cortana. Enjoy and have a good week!

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