On Mon, 31 Mar 2014 09:59:19 -0400, "Mayayana"
wrote:

| The new or off-lease computer would come with the OS installed, and
| installing virtual XP is litterally a "piece of cake".

You mean Virtual XP mode for Win7? I thought you
meant installing a VM. I don't know anything about
Virtual XP mode, but it seems to require Win7 Pro,
which costs quite a bit more than Win7 Home OEM.
Maybe that's worth it to someone who can't give up
XP but *has to* buy a new machine.

| I've been in the PC business now for 25 years (well, will be 25
| years in August). 256 is inadequate to run anything of consequence on
| XP. 512 will work, but 1024 really wakes it up, particularly if
| running 2 programs at a time. Takes all the load off the hard drive
| (swap file/virtual ram issues). With 256 ram, you WILL wear out the
| hard drive.
|


Virtual XP IS a VM.
It comes standard on Win7 Pro, and can be downloaded for free from
Microsoft if you need it on a "lesser" OS.

Personally, I ALWAYS buy Pro, so it's not an issue for me (I need the
network capability of Pro - lesser OS cannot join a domain)
How is it that so many people in a home repair group
suddenly turn out to build computers for a living?

I wouldn't prefer to install 256 MB RAM, of course, and
there is an issue these days with bloated software, but
256 MB RAM can work OK on a clean machine where people
are doing typical things like Web browsing, email Office
docs, etc. If you're worried about wearing out your hard
disk then turn off the useless indexing service and either
avoid AV or at least don't leave it at default settings,
scanning everything you touch. There are lots of software
causes of running the disk unnecessarily that have nothing
to do with using the swap file.