I've seen other treads on this, but no solutions were given other than "check for background processes in the VM" and "suspend instead of letting it go idle". These are not solutions.
I have a window 7 VM with indexing, system restore, and idle virus scanning disabled. Virtual memory in the VM has its own storage partition.
If I have this VM running and I start doing other things, like safari, mail, etc., MacBook's fans start going crazy and activity monitor shows 100% (one core) used by the VM. (It's worth noting that the VM has access to four cores, so when it's actually busy, cpu usage for the VM goes to 400% in activity monitor.) When I bring the VM back into focus, even without providing any input, the CPU drops back to the "normal" idle usage for the VM (less than 5%). If I leave the VM window where it's still visible (but not in focus) and watch the task manager, nothing except the system idle process is taking any non-trivial amount of cpu.
Does anyone have any insight as to why this is happening? Suspending the VM to avoid this is rediculous, as it takes minutes to write the RAM's contents (4GB) to storage, and minutes again to read it back into the VM's RAM upon unsuspending.
Thanks,
Tim