I found that although both of my guest VM's in Virtual PC worked ok in the Asus netbook, one day they just quit running properly on the netbook. This happens to both of the VM's the Win 98E guest and the Win 3.11 guest. I tried copying/pasting both VM's from my Dell Dimension 8200 onto the M1530, but they no longer run properly as before - they sort of freeze up.

How do I fix this? Do I have to delete them and start all over again with new guests in the M1530?

If the same VM's still work on the Asus and the 8200, the problem is probably with the M1530 (or is it the netbook). Have you checked what the power settings are on those laptops? Are they set to performance or to power saving?

Windows 3.1 can be a pain - assuming you don't start Windows in your autoexec.bat, run defrag from the command prompt and try to start it again.

There are also many settings in the config.sys that control conventional, upper and XMS memory allocations. Unfortunately there is no perfect rule of thumb when defining them.

If you're loading smartdrive in config.sys (or autoexec for that matter) comment it out (place the word REM in front of each line).

Does DOS ever start?

Edit -

One other thought fow Windows 3.1 - how much memory did you define to the VM? If it's greater than 16MB lower it. Anything between 8 and 16 seems to run the VM fairly stable.

No, I never thought of that - what's the difference?



Just checked on the Asus netbook. Power scheme is set for portable/laptop, and settings for this scheme were originally (but either Tim or I might have tinkered with these a year ago when trying to fix the screen flicker that I was complaining about that caused anomalies in some of my gaming screenshots while I was gaming on one of these guests on this computer, but I don't exactly recall if they were changed or not), and I just changed these settings on the netbook to -

--turn off monitor (plugged - never), (battery - never);
--turn off HDD (plugged - never), (battery - never);
--system standby (plugged - never), (battery - never).


Haven't checked power settings on the M1530, but will get to it maybe tonight.

To be more specific, the mouse freezes in these VM's on the M1530, even when a game is not running, and colored blocks appear onscreen when I clicked the mouse (in the Win98SE VM last night while trying to install ROTS in the guest. How do I fix this?

You need the power set to Performance and not to Power saving. You may not see something like that for the M1530 if you didn't install the necessary software for power control. You might see it on the Asus as long as its automatic power consumption adjustment only extends to its video card. Setting the pwer to Performance is not the same as simply turning off the monitor or hard drive or standby after some number of minutes. The "Performance" setting should prevent the processor from downclocking when it thinks it wants to save energy. When the processor is downclocked, your computer will run slower and may not be fast enough for the OS inside a virtual machine to run smoothly.