How to tune-up your VM

Have you got some performance problems with your Virtual Machine? Are you experiencing damm slow responses to your actions and semi hang-ups? Here are some tips to speed-up a bit your VM:

• Defrag your real HD and your VM (inside it, run Windows' Defrag or better, use O&O Defrag Professional in "Complete -> Last Access" mode)
• Use Invirtus VM Optimizer with your VM. My actual work's VM (WinXPSP2 with VS2003 and SQL 2000 with Reporting Services) went from 4,2 GB to 3,0 GB used space, and runs damm fast.
• Use the Virtual PC's "Compact Hard Disk" option (VM settings -> Hard Disk -> Virtual Disk Wizard -> Edit Existing -> Choose yours -> Compact It option)
• Do not use existing HDs as base ones. Create all VM's HDs as new ones (I have "clean VMs" with just the OS installed). Otherwise you'll get plenty of free space, but affects performance a lot.
• Disable Windows' Index Search in your VM's HD (My PC -> hard disk right click -> Properties).
• Run Frecuently CCleaner in your VM to keep the registry "fresh and clean".
• Trivial... but remove all unused software and Windows components.

Hope this helps ;)

UPDATE: Tested Invirtus VM Optimizer against anotheer VM (WinXP SP2 with .NET 2.0, SQL 2000, Borland Together and more software) and this time the occupied space went from 4,72 GB to 2,20 GB! Im really pleased, the bigger the VM is the better it cleans it.