Optimizing your VPC part 2

First let's disable some services that won't be used in the VPC (for now) and can help speeding up your VPC.

First service we are going to disable is the Error Reporting Service.

As we planned to do demos without failures this service would be one of the useless services<g>

Select the Error Reporting Service and right click to access the Properties menu.

In the Error Reporting Service dialog

Change the Startup to Disabled.

Same thing for the Help and Support service:

Change startup to Disabled.

The next thing we are doing is changing the display properties. Right click the desktop and select Properties to get to the Display Properties dialog

Select the Settings tab.

Click the Advanced button and select the Troubleshoot tab.

In this dialog shift the slider all the way to the right to get Full hardware accelleration. There are some discussions on this item, you are in a virtual world aren't you? Well yes, that is true, however the virtual machine additions have been updated to benefit from the full hardware accelleration setting.

So that explained we change this to full. If you have any issues with your mouse visibility in the VPC try to move the slider one step to the left, that should fix that.

To save all your memory, remove the background wallpaper from your desktop by selecting <none> in the Desktop tab in the dialog properties.

Screensaver, also not needed in your VPC. Select <none> in the Screen Saver tab in the Display Properties dialog.

Right click "My Computer" and select Properties from the context menu.

Select the Advanced tab.

Click on the Settings button under Performance.

Select the Adjust for best performance radio option and click OK to get back to the advanced tab.

From the Advanced tab click Settings under Startup and Recovery.

Disable the writing of debugging information by selecting (none) in the Write debugging information section. Click OK to return to the tabs.

Now select the Remote tab and disable all remote options for this VPC. It is most likely that we don't use the remote options for the VPC. Remember that if you want to create VPCs to act as real servers, you may want to enable the remote option. For demo purposes I recommend to disable it.

Next... Open Explorer, goto Tools-Folder Options

On the View tab, disable Automatically search for network folders and printers.

And apply this to all folders by clicking the Apply to all folders button.

Click Yes in the Folder views dialog.

And finally do a defrag on your c-drive in your Virtual PC.

What's next? Change your server into a Domain Server with Active Directory!

Extra .. Extra .. (Added 05-24-2007)

Found some useful links with more options to improve your VPC at:
Andrew Connell blog and
Sahil Malik blog

Keep the tips coming! Very useful ...