Hi, I am running CentOS 5.3 32bit as a VirtualBox 3.0.0 guest running on Windows XP. The Windows host CPU usage is constantly at 50% although the CentOS guest is completely idle (i.e. 0.00 load average). I know this is a common problem related to the 1000Hz frequency that the CentOS kernel runs at. With previous versions of CentOS, I used the kernel-vm package [1] and it solved my problem. However, according to the README [2] this isn't necessary as of CentOS 5.3 and therefore these packages are not maintained anymore (the latest released kernel-vm is 2.6.18-92.1.22). >From what I understand, as of CentOS 5.3 it is possible to use the "divider=10 clocksource=acpi_pm" to reduce the frequency to 100Hz. I tried this setting, and it made no difference at all. I also tried to install the VirtualBox guest extensions, and still, the host CPU never goes below 50%. Is there any way to solve this issue without resorting to a custom kernel build? Thanks, Sagi [1] http://people.centos.org/tru/kernel-vm/ [2] http://people.centos.org/tru/kernel-vm/readme.txt