Painfully slow Windows 10 on Virtualbox

Solution 1:

I know your machine is technically above minimum spec for Windows 10*, but as you're running it in a VM rather than natively you can expect it to run considerably slower.

Windows 10, even more than High Sierra, is not designed to run from an old-style spinning hard drive, but from SSD.

You may be able to squeeze a little more performance out of it if you run it in Boot Camp [though you'd have to install Win7 & get to 10 via an in-place update] but you are really never going to see comfortable operating speeds on that hardware.

In a VM, you will achieve maximum performance in the VM itself [at slight cost to the host OS] by allocating the same number of processors as your CPU physically possesses. This will allow your host to actually operate in the HT cores & the VM to grab the primary thread in each core. [I've no idea how that works technically, but empirically that seems to be the case when watching Activity Monitor's CPU display.]

*Microsoft, btw, when quoting min spec, fails to recognise that drivers may no longer be avalibale for the hardware. Your GPU, for instance has no Win10 support from NVidia. It was legacied years ago.

Solution 2:

Whilst this post is quite specific to your Mac and the confirmed answer is that your hardware is under spec, it is the main general search result when attempting to resolve Windows 10 performance on VirtualBox on Mac.

I have found this to be an issue on my 2018 MacBook Pro (2.7Ghz quad core i7, 16GB RAM) when using the VirtualBox console to interact with the VM. The VM is not usable even when running no applications on the host and giving the VM most the resources.

The solution I have found is to run the VM headless in VirtualBox and access the VM using RDP (Microsoft Remote Desktop for Mac). In this configuration the VM runs seamlessly when given moderate resources (2 cores and 6GB RAM).