Let me rephrase: your laptop was using Win-XP 32-bits and you've copied that installation to a virtual machine. Your laptop now uses Windows 7 but that doesn't matter for the whole question, right? Then again, your laptop seems to be powerful enough to run a 64-bits Windows 7 system so the VMWare host needs to be powerful enough to host it all.
First of all, you should always expect performance to go down if the host is as powerful as the original system. There's this virtualization layer in-between which adds some delays. I did the same with a laptop of mine, but the virtual machine I created is hosted on a much more powerful system, thus performance went up.
Possible bottlenecks could be an installation of SQL Server or other database inside the virtual machine. These tend to eat up a lot of resources. It might be better to install SQL Server on the host instead and make the VM connect to this "external" database.
Other problems could be the amount of RAM that the virtual machine has. Even though XP works well with 512 MB, I tend to give my VM's up to 2 GB of RAM. That way, the VM will use less of it's own swapfile, simply because it has more memory available.
Another bottleneck could be the harddisk that contains the VM. If this is connected to your system through an USB cable then it will definitely be slow. I tend to give VM's two disks. One with the operating system which will be located on the fastest disk in my host and the other for data which could be any disk. Often I use a network share for this, and share a disk/folder on the host. This way, data is available from inside and outside the VM.
The system disk would be up to 8 GB in size and I tend to claim this disk space immediately, instead of having VMWare increase the disk size little by little. It does increases performance but eats up a lot of disk space.
Don't put this virtual machine on a compressed disk to save disk space! Disk compression tends to make disk access a bit faster since it actually has to read less data from disk but it also puts a bigger strain on your processor since it needs to decompress this data again. It puts a bigger demand on your CPU, which might even increase the heat inside your system. With laptops, the system tends to decrease the CPU speed when the fan can't cool down the system enough.
i have yet to see anything good coming out of a converted physical installation, they never do as well as a clean VMware installation. but i do wish you the best of luck with your tweaking efforts. – None – 2009-12-28T17:37:41.083
What are the specs on your laptop? Have you done a clean installation to see how it performs? It might tell you if your P2V just sucks or if you have too high of expectations. You could also try running it in Vbox – prestomation – 2009-12-28T17:50:03.833
2@Molly, I did several physical convertions of older computers of mine, which all seem to work well simply because the host is far more powerful than the old systems themselves. For example, I often use a converted installation that originated from an Windows XP installation running on a Pentium III system with 512 MB RAM at 866 MHz. Then again, the VM now runs on an Intel Xeon Quadcore with 12 GB of RAM thus the performance gain comes from the much better hardware. (The VM now uses two CPU's and 2 GB of RAM.) – Wim ten Brink – 2009-12-28T18:00:59.430
1Alex, i'm not really comparing the hardware side, but the fact remains that a clean VMware installation always beats a conversion, even at the best of times if there are no conflicts with drivers for the old hardware or other hickups. sure, conversion is a viable means if you have some old software that you cannot recover otherwise and similar scenarios but if i want performance, then i certainly go for a clean installation. – None – 2009-12-28T18:22:54.673