Joe's Random Ramblings

Like a lot of people, we are using VMWare in development to test our programs.
For way too long now, I have been battling with VMWare Workstation 5.5 having a clock that's running way too fast in the guest OS.
VMWare nowadays has some knowledge base articles about it, e.g., here and here.
From these articles, I understand that the problem has to do with the power management on the host machine, which in my case is Windows XP.
There are also several threads in the VMWare forums about this problem, here and here.
I have done what was suggested in these threads, in particular, I have disabled the "Cool & Quiet" setting in the BIOS. Unfortunately, the BIOS for my Dell Dimension E521 doesn't have any way to change the HPET.
Despite all of this, the guest OS still runs too fast when the host machine has been idle for some time (e.g., over night). Since I am trying to run timing tests over night, that's pretty much a killer for me...
I am really wondering why VMWare hasn't fixed this yet.

Update: AMD has what they call a "Dual-Core Optimizer" utility. That finally seems to have solved the problem. I installed it, and kept the VM running over the weekend. And lo and behold, the clock in the VM still runs fine this Monday morning.