Virtual PC environment is big plus for Microsoft SharePoint development which requires regular iisreset command to reflect the GAC changes. This causes other team members to lose productivity if everyone is working on a shared server.
For more details on Microsoft Virtual PC visit: Microsoft Virtual PC Overview
There are numerous blog postings regarding performance of VPC: Andrew Connell, Sahil Malik
After following all these tips my VPC running on Lenovo laptop (host) was still dragging in performance. The VPC was running with Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2005.
Two things did the trick for me:
a) Turn off SQL Server service and other non-important ones like Error reporting service, Wireless service, Windows Update Service etc. I was mainly doing AJAX UI development on this VPC and therefore disabling SQL Server service was safe.
b) I was initially using 1.5GB on VPC as my host machine running on Vista 64 (Intel dual processors) had 4GB of RAM but this did not help in any way regarding performance.
The trick which worked for me was to set the VPC memory to 1GB, this gave me an immediate performance boost!
