I own a Thinkpad T420s with 8GB RAM, 160 GB SSD and a quite fast i7 processor. Summa summarum a very fast computer that works perfectly. Now, I am not very impressed by the performance of my Ubuntu 12.04 virtual machine running on VirtualBox 4.1.18. I assume that Virtual Machines are always a bit slower than the guest system, still I think it should be more performant given the hardware settings I give it:

• 4096 MB RAM

• 1 CPU without CPU limitation (I would like to give it more but then it does not seem to work - I am not experienced in this maybe somebody could give me advice on this too)

• Activated PAE/NX, VT-x/AMD-V and Nested Paging

• 96 MB Graphics Memory (no 2D or 3D acceleration)

• ~ 14 GB disk space, currently about 7 GB are used

Maybe I misconfigured something, could you give me a hint please? Thanks!

Edit: What I mean by slow is that for example switching tabs in the browser (whether FF or Chrome) only goes with a 0.5s delay or something, as well as switching application windows and/or double-clicking applications in the dock to get all open windows.. opening Aptana takes about a minute whereas opening something like Photoshop on the guest system takes 5 seconds