Architectural mood swings

For my work I got a new Dell Vostro 1700. It's a great machine. 2 gigs of memory. A 7200RPM sata disc. Core 2 Duo CPU. 1920x1200 resolution. Pretty fast for a notebook. Fast enough to run me a virtual instance of Windows Server 2003 right? Well that seemed to be a bit of a problem.

I created a completely clean install of Windows Server 2003 R2. Installed all updates and installed the Virtual Machine additions. But still I seemed to have a "erratic mouse". And not only the mouse, the whole system seemed to suffer from that problem. It was as if the vritual CPU could not synchronize with the host CPU.

After investigation I came across this blog post. It provides this workaround:

1. Stop running Virtual PC
2. Open notepad
3. Open %appdata%\Microsoft\Virtual PC\options.xml
4. Locate or create the <virtual_machines> section of the file and add this key:
   <enable_idle_thread type="boolean">true</enable_idle_thread>
5. Save the file and exit notepad
6. Start Virtual PC

It worked on my notebook. It is a very dirty fix, because it simulates an idle thread to sync the CPU cycles, but still, it worked.

The problem I experienced, had something to do with a specific version of "Speedstep" which is used in some intel centrino chipsets. It's actually a Virtual PC problem, since VMWare and Parallels didn't seem to have the problem. I don't have a complete list of which chipsets have the problem, but when you have the problem, and you have a centrino notebook, try this fix.