I’m running a Windows VM on my Windows laptop using VMware. Task manager is showing 15% cpu usage when both host and guest are idle. It’s always done this. Why? I wouldn’t care but it slashes my battery life in half nearly.

If you are sat in a chair, you are idle, but you are still burning energy.

It’s just like that.

Jamie, you’re useless

🙂

Maybe??

Hmm, seems promising, but I can’t find anything in my settings about HAL.

You are much more useful than Jamie.

Have you changed the number of processor cores assigned to the guest OS after installation? That’d do it.

(Aside: I always knew that that this was an unsupported configuration, but never why. That link ^^ is the other half of the puzzle. Ta.)

Presumably VM Ware uses some processing power to keep the vm open?

<nods> Depends what you mean by ‘idle’ too, of course. “Idle” Windows systems are sometimes anything but, the OS could be doing $stuff in the background. Have you checked taskman on the guest?

Don’t think I have changed them, no. I can’t find the optoins mentioned in Woody’s link at all. This is VMWare workstation 8.

The cpu on the guest is the usual 1-2%, on the host it’s 15%. At least it was when I posted this, it’s now down to about 5% but the fan is still going so it’s clearly using power.

I get this quite often running W7 in parallels on my Mac – the VM is usually chomping away at about 15% when task manager within the guest says 1-2%.

Having scanned, scanned and scanned again for malware or viruses, I just put it down to general windows crapness. Probably windows update doing something in the background – it usually seems worse either just before or after windows decides it needs to update.

It’s the ads on here.

😉

I don’t know about windows, but with Linux guests running older kernels on any virtualisation, it helps to reduce the clock wakeup frequency – normally from 1000Hz to 100Hz. Newer kernels are tickless so they’re not continually interrupting the hypervisor & consequently have lower overhead.

This WMWare link suggests windows experiences it too.