Hi there,
First, I would suggest that you grab the latest release of Bochs. Current version is at
http://bochs.sourceforge.net/ and is v2.6.9. Then I suggest you grab the latest bochsrc.txt file from
https://sourceforge.net/p/bochs/code/HE ... s/.bochsrc (
https://sourceforge.net/p/bochs/code/HE ... format=raw). It currently has general/common used items already set. You can go through it and comment out items you don't plan to use. It also has many comments to instruct you on each item.
As for the speed, Bochs is not meant to be fast. Bochs is meant to be used as a testing tool, a tool that will emulate each and every instruction, hardware task, etc., with a lot of debugging capabilities to be able to test your guest. Yes, this makes Bochs considerably slower than other emulators. However, when tracking down a bug, in my opinion, there is no better emulator environment.
If you wish for a faster emulator, there is QEMU from
https://www.qemu.org/, Oracle's VirtualBox from
https://www.virtualbox.org/, along with a few others.
QEMU is quite fast, but since the support for WinXP has been dropped, I can no longer stay up with latest releases.
VirtualBox is also quite fast, not as fast as QEMU but much faster than Bochs, and has a nice interface.
However, neither compare to Bochs' ability to debug the Quest.
Hope this helps,
Ben