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Guest clock running way too fast in VMware

I just noticed that the clock on my guest Windows XP system was running way too fast on my host Ubuntu Gutsy system. I had also noticed that double clicking seemed really difficult and there were a few anomalies with sound.

A bit of Googling turned up this tip from the VMware knowledge base. So to fix things I added these lines to the bottom of /etc/vmware/config.

host.cpukHz = 3060000
host.noTSC = TRUE
ptsc.noTSC = TRUE

Now the clock and lots of other things are better.

3 comments

#1 sufehmi on 03.10.08 at 10:35 pm

Excellent, will try this asap.

A hint, to find out your CPU’s speed in a Linux host, type ” cat /proc/cpuinfo,
and look for a line beginning with “cpu MHz”

By the way, I searched for “vmware gutsy clock” in Google, and got this page.
Thank you very much for sharing.

#2 sufehmi on 03.10.08 at 10:36 pm

A bit more detail on finding (and setting) your host’s cpu speed : http://blog.autoedification.com/2006/11/vmware-guest-clock-runs-fast.html

Thanks.

#3 sufehmi on 03.10.08 at 10:53 pm

A bit more detail :

Find out current settings : cpufreq-info

I have a dual-core CPU, so I need to ran cpufreq-set twice :

cpufreq-set -c 0 -g performance
cpufreq-set -c 1 -g performance

This should put the CPU cores into a fixed (maximum) speed.

To ensure the new setting has been applied, check again : cpufreq-info

Then the clock in the VMware guests should behave better. If not, try the suggestion in the post above.

Hope it helps.

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