Re: can I make this work… (Foundation for accessibility project)

["Eric S. Johansson" <esj@eggo.org>]

On 11/18/2014 9:57 AM, Eric S. Johansson wrote:
>
> That's great to know. I will spin up a version of Windows 7 and give 
> it a try given that I'm not looking at it, I can strip it down to the 
> barest user interface elements and improve performance significantly.

I tried it and it took me approximately 10 to 12 hours to install 
Windows 7 twice and I didn't even finish installing the last time.

Here's what happened. The first time I installed it, it was a naïve 
install. Took all the defaults just set up the ISO and let the install 
run. Then I installed all the updates. Hours went by and it kind of came 
up and ran but then I tried to install the virt I/O drivers and the 
Windows installation lost its mind. Did some reading on how to make 
performance better and on using the virtio drivers in windows.

So I start of the second install, same size disk 25 GB, same amount of 
RAM, 1 GB and installed the ethernet, disk and balloon drivers at the 
right time. I also changed the cache to none, I/O something to native 
and I think that's about it. Anyway, that was not really any 
improvement. It's still was incredibly slow and this time it was 
complaining about running out of memory and packages install never 
finished. Just kept going and going going.  iptraf reported network io 
ranging from 3kbit to 100kbit range when the updates were running.

I'm accustomed to lesser performance on virtual machines. That's the 
hazard of a running on old and slow laptop  (dell e6400 (2.2ghz core 
duo, 8gb ram)[1]) but even virtual box is not this slow.  So what am I 
doing wrong? It would be nice to use a slow machine like this as many 
handcrips don't have a whole lot of resources for buying newer/faster 
machines. On the other hand, many of them use desktops and work from one 
place whereas someone like me is all over the map (quite literally).

--- eric
[1] Part of the reason I don't bother upgrading machines all that often 
is because it no matter how fast the CPU runs or how much memory I have, 
Windows always runs about the same speed.