george [dicegeorge] wrote:
On 16/04/12 16:48, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Mark wrote:
On Thu, 12 Apr 2012 12:38:29 +0100, John Rumm
wrote:

[-snip-]

However, XP mode is in reality a complete virtual machine running a
real copy of WinXP. There is nothing to stop you using any other
virtual PC hypervisor (including Microsoft's own Virtual PC) and
installing your own real copy of XP on that.

Running virtual machines can be very useful. However I would avoid
Microsoft Virtual PC. It's v-e-r-y slow. Oracle (Sun) VirtualBox is
much better IMHO.


Virtualbox is - adequate.

In order to get stable operation I have had to turn off MOST of the
'hardware acceleration' and that makes cursor response a but crappy, and
also flash videos don't really run smoothly under my XP machine.

But that's OK because of what I want my windows FOR. which is graphics
work.

Its useless for all but the simplest games, but its fine for RhinoCAD
and CorelDraw. And by doing what amounts to a suspend rather than a
shutdown, I can 'reboot' it in a few seconds.

For everything else there is Linux. Massively robust and functional.
Thouugh it did go doolally trying to transer a 15 Mbyte file via NFS to
a remote machines on the net...NFS is a fine protocol, but not over
links that occasioally do down..:-)




drat - virtualbox only 'adequate'?
I'm buying a new laptop,
my plan was to have Windows7 then virtual box then Xubuntu,
and I'd thought it would run almost as fast as if dualbooted.
Where is your slowdown coming from?


Video layer

simulating a video card + driver that maps to a windowed X windows is
not massively fast..

everything else is fine: in program computation gets pretty much as much
CPU as the basic linux timeslice allows, and its not a huge overhead in
context switching, so CPU intensive stuff is fine.

networking takes a BIT of a hit - again there is a 'virtual ethernet
card' presented.


But its for sure fast enough to access the internet full speed, even if
the 100Mbps LAN is only about 20...

So whatever you play games on/watch HD TV over the internet on /watch
flash on, make that your primary OS.


I am not sure why one would want a virtual Linux machine tho. Except to
play with.


I had playing with computers in about 1984 when I started to program
them for a living..

What I want is a stable platform for the things I need to do, and thats
linux. I tolerate windows because I cat get two apps I need on any other OS.




[george]


--
To people who know nothing, anything is possible.
To people who know too much, it is a sad fact
that they know how little is really possible -
and how hard it is to achieve it.