Heya! I use Hyper-V for virtualization on my laptop because the Windows Phone emulator requires it. It works good and won't switch to Virtualbox or VMWare. Here comes the thing. All these VMs I run are less responsive then a VM in VB or Vmware. Which is no problem for me at all until now. I need one VM which can act like a normal Windows 7 installation without slow animations or pixel looking graphics. So how do I get a Windows 7 VM running smooth with all the animations like it's running on the real hardware? I'm running Windows 8 Pro and the VM is Windows 7 Home Premium. I gave it 2048GB dynamic memory and 4 processors in the settings. I have also read about RemoteFX but that was kind of unclear to me if it will run..
2Gb memory & 4 virtual CPUs is pointless. You will have better performance with single virtual CPU (or two at the most) You might also state what you are running host W8 on...
If you switch to Windows Server 2012 you could enable RemoteFX. That allows guests to use DirectX 10 & 11. It is still sluggish but slight better than normal.
Have you tried just to RDP into VM? There is NO way to make RemoteFX work in Win8, it is pure server feature, hence when you RDP8 to the VM, you get way better graphics. Moreover, switching to WS2012 won't help either, as RemoteFX requires single version stack of RDP client, hypervisor and VM OS, -> it would work with Win8/WS2012 VMs, but won't with Win7. Moreover again -> RemoteFX on WS2008R2SP1 which works fine with Win7SP1 won't work with HomePremium, but only with Enterprise/Ultimate SKUs of Win7.
I find the graphics via RDP only marginally better than the Hyper-V connection. Sound is the best feature and also USB redirection if you are using RemoteFX.
The RDP is better then the remote program with Hyper-V. That is why I use that mostly and is workable. Further is RemoteFX not an option for me or I have to virtualize a VM in a virtualized Server 2012 which won't work.