Thursday, September 6, 2007

VMware Workstation, Dell D620 Laptop, and Intel SpeedStep... oh boy!

It turns out that SpeedStep on a laptop is a really bad thing when you are trying to use a VM. The symptoms are that the clock in the VM runs about twice as fast. Note that my laptop report a minimum processor speed of ~1GHz and max at 2GHz. So I noticed that the real clock was record seconds go by between 1.5 - 2x faster than normal! This might explain why a coworked and I could not get our VMs to function correctly on a demo visit to a partner's office. To fix it I rebooted, turned off SpeedStep in the BIOS.

When I don't have a VM on my laptop, i.e. after vacation, I will restore the SpeedStep.