Lots of people seem to have problems running Microsoft Virtual PC on their laptops. Typically *really* slow virtual machines or sticky keys / multiple keystrokes.

This seems to be related to power management ("speed step" or "speed stepping" on my Dell) on the laptop. But disbling (i.e. always run at full throttle) the damn thing might not help.

A lot of those people have found that running seti-at-home (or similar sofware) solves the problem. It did for me too.

But I really didn't like to use my computer to explore the universe while working with Virtual PC. So I wrote a *really* simple program that does the same kind of idle processing, but keeps my Dell at full speed at all times. Virtual PC runs like a dream now. Can't remember if VMWare had the same problems. If so, this might solve it. Then again, it might not.

Download and try it out (archive contains executable and source code): donothingreallyfast.zip

Note: This thing hasn't any windows, so you need to kill it manually from task manager.