Windows 10: Virtual machine slowness

I was fortunate to get a few license keys for 2016 server and I set up a virtual machine for testing purposes. The last 2 times I ran it I ran into major slowness issues. The mouse was lagging and jerking around to different parts of the window, the right click menus where loading on the opposite side of the window from which I opened them, and the start menu would only open if I hit the Windows key. The first time this happened I attributed this to installing updates but that wasn't the case the last time. Now I have given all of my virtual machines from Vista and 2008 on up the same specs. They get 2 cores of my 3.2 ghz quad core i3 and 2 gb of ram out of my system's 8. I can run any of the rest of the VMs without any performance issues. I can even run 2 of them at a time just fine with no slowness on the virtual machines or on my host OS but lately I am having problems even running the 2016 VM by itself. CPU and memory usage seemed a little high running anywhere from 10-30% with defender and .net optimization taking up the bulk of the CPU cycles. This has me flabbergasted considering that I really don't do anything with this VM other than look around and keep it updated. I don't have any server related software running on it at all. I don't run browsers or office software on it. Any advise? I'm not as familiar with 10 as I am 7 so I'm not sure what to look for. I didn't find any way to turn off .net optimization. Is there a way to turn that off? It isn't showing up under services. At the time of the slowness I wasn't experiencing any issues on my host. If it helps I am using Vmware workstation 12.5.9 on Windows 7.

:)

 

Clean install of W10 not possible in Virtual Machine.


Please get a cup of coffee, lean back and think an answer for these two questions. Take your time, then check the answers below the questions:

Questions:

• If you do a clean install of let's say Windows 10 Insider Build 10525 on a totally new computer which has never had an activated Windows 10 on it, does it activate?
• If you do a clean install of Windows 10 Insider Build on a computer where the underlying Windows 10, upgraded from a qualifying old operating system has already been activated, does it activate?

Answers:

• No, of course not.
• Yes, of course.

Why do you think that a virtual machine would make any difference? You have tried to install Windows 10 on a totally new machine which has never had an activated Windows 10 installed, therefore the Microsoft activation servers block the activation due invalid machine ID. In the highlighted part in below quote you admit your mistake yourself, plain and simple, yet you when doing this wrong draw conclusion that even if done correctly it would not work:

What you have tried is essentially the same as if you took a brand new real physical PC without any operating system, which has never had any operating system, and then installed Windows 10 Insider Preview wondering why it does not activate! Virtual Machines behave exactly the same way; if you want to clean install Windows 10 Insider Preview and get it activated you must do it on an existing virtual machine, one which has already had an upgraded Windows 10 activated. This "computer", the virtual machine, its machine ID is marked on activation servers as valid and activated and it will of course activate.

Be it a virtual machine or a physical computer, you cannot activate a clean installed Windows 10 Insider Preview on a totally new machine. How difficult can this be to understand?

When clean installing Windows 10 Insider Preview on a computer which has already had a previous Windows 10 Insider activated, you do not use the product key! It will be asked twice, once before the installation starts and once after the last reboot to OOBE phase. In both cases you skip the product key and your Windows will be automatically activated.

 

Clean install of W10 not possible in Virtual Machine.


@Kari

You can do clean install with windows 10 but it won't activate on Virtual Machine at least it didn't on mine. I followed the proper steps to do that.

Again I will repeat what I did step by step with some additions.

Step 1 Installed windows 7 retail on a virtual box, it activated without issue.
Step 2 changed the virtual box description to windows 10
Step 3 upgrade to windows 10 and it activated without issue
Step 4 backed up (So I could go back to it later)
Step 5 Removed windows 10.
Step 6 created a new virtual machine
Step 7 Installed clean windows 10 and it didn't activate and did that error code see below.


@night-hawk had a similar issue and got the same error code

Error code: 0xC004C003 with the specified product key being blocked

Night Hawk does it make a difference on what version of Virtual box that you are using?

My testing was done on Xubuntu using VirtualBox Graphical user interface version 4.3.26-Ubuntu r98988

 

Virtual Machine in Win10

Hi Brian,

You can actually create a Virtual machine to your computer, just follow the steps from this

link.

Thanks.