Dos slow. >10x compared to other host. VBox GUI slow.

[Charlie]

i have a boot floppy that simply boots to dos. it includes an archive of utilities in a CAB file. it extracts the contents to a ram drive. i did have a USB HDD connected, and a CD image from the network connected - same if not connected.

the decompression runs slow on vbox, like 10x or more slower compared to:

i ran same images on a windows 2000 machine (old vbox), although the dos USB drivers caused old vbox to hang, the other FDD image without USB ran fine and faster. 4s for a file compared to >40s.

CPU is close to 50%, system is vista ultimate, 4.0.8 vbox

also when opening things, ie going to change if the USB HDD is connected or not also causes the lag, so not specifically a virtualization problem. same for choosing the CD or HDD images. the frame appears, the CPU is 50% for a short time then the contents of the "settings" appears.

windows XP emulated system seems to run fine. cannot remember if i saw the gui problems earlier, but now i do because DOS is so slow. simply entering C: (return) did nothing and i gave up.

cb

[Charlie]

i would attach floppy files but limit is less than 400Kb.

[Charlie]

hmm might partially be related to the USB drivers, as not having one allows the C: (return) thing to work immediately (and also Msd.exe). but decompression is still super slow. floppy creates ramdisk and copys my customised ebd.cab to it (i think) then extracts ebd to the ramdisk.

the usb drive written about in the original post was a 320GB maxtor HDD with a single partition.