Third Times a Charm

For those who may have missed it, I have been having lots of trouble
running Windows Vista in a virtual machine on my new Thinkpad T61
laptop. The Vista clock ends up running roughly twice as fast as the
system clock and that wreaks havoc with my work
VPN connection. (See

here and here.) I have been continuing to have problems despite

my attempts, so once more I turned to Google and finally found the
answer and a proper explanation to my problem. On systems where the
processor speed varies with system load the virtual machine reads clock
update interrupts at different time intervals. Since the VM is not aware
of the dynamic processor speed, it updates the clock either too quickly
or too slowly. The good news is that there is a simple configuration
change that fixes this. By adding three lines to the /etc/vmware/config
file (on Linux systems) it is possible to tell VMware to ignore the
system time interrupts and keep track of time in software. To fix this
issue, add the following lines to /etc/vmware/config:
host.cpukHz = 2200000 host.noTSC = TRUE ptsc.noTSC = TRUE

However, be warned that if you ever need to run vmware-config.pl to
rebuild your kernel modules, then these settings will be wiped out.

Hat tip to the Ubuntu Forums where I found this solution.