New
#11
Dual booting XP and 7?
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New #12
To me, the problems/cons with running VM on top of your active OS are:
1) Not friendly for your memory and cpu usages if you do not have enough of them. I have 2Gb RAM, my W7 is light (with largest app being Lotus Notes), my Xp VM is also light (got nothing on it actually). When i launch Xpmode my RAM is at 1.50Gb usage and this is not good if i want to use all my apps.
2) If you don't know what dual monitor is. I mean, what is the use of using two OSs on one screen? There is no point in running VM in the background and not use it/see it. Matter of fact it can be gay if you know what i mean. Unless you really need to run Xpmode and for the reason it was intended (run apps that are not compatible with w7), there is no point in having it other than doing things which i am currently doing...
lets not go there.
As for dual-boot, if you set it up right and not play around with all things boot/system partition or intro viruses to your system, i don't see any disadvantages. As DeaconFrost said, If for some reason your W7 died and you need to use your PC, you can boot to Xp. If you don't have Xp, how much time does it take to rebuild? and what if you don't have no system or drive backups?
Dual boot may be getting less popular coming to the age of VMs but it's still nice to have it.
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New #13
Sure you will. And you'll also hinder the performance of Windows 7 because now your system is wasting RAM on XP.
Throwing out terms like "Intel's VT technology" is not going to change the facts. Not all of the latest dual-core/quad-core CPUs even support virtualization.
You're right I did forget about it. Subconsciously even, because I can fix boot problems with a snap of my fingers, in my sleep, with one hand tied behind my back.
Actually it was I who you were quoting and agreeing with there. +Rep for you
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New #14
Damn straight sup3rsprt, we are one with that.
I wonder when it will be possible for there to be ZERO overheads for the base OS, when running VM. This would mean, installing your private VM on Microsoft's Supercomputers and accessing it over the net when you need it. No overheads there right?
Add to that, ZERO fear of having a dead machine. This would mean a connection to that Supercomputer for restoring you Base OS independent of hardware restrictions. Maybe a small device inside your PC that act independently of your PC lol.
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New #15
That's a very good point. Cloud computing is certainly becoming of high interest as of late. Just look at companies like Microsoft and Google who have been striving to make applications accessible through the web browser.
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New #16
Run the VM in VMWARE iusing FREE VMWARE SERVER.
Then the XP runs in the background - you only logon to it when you need to and because the console is "browser" based you can log on to the vm machine from ANYWHERE on your network or the Internet --no need for RDP etc etc.
Very efficient.
However remember all the RAM you allocate to a VM is NOT available to the Host -- so if you allocate a 2GB RAM for your VM then the HOST W7 system will only use the other 2GB in a 4GB machine for running.
However a typical XP machine will run very snapily as a VM on W7 with as little as 512MB (give it between 640MB and 1GB however).
Cheers
jimbo
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New #17
Spoken like someone who hasn't tried it. XP runs at pretty much native speed on hardware with VT. Since you care about facts so much, do yourself a favor and try it out for yourself, and then take a moment to read some whitepapers on what VT does. Pay special attention to the parts on how VT allows the VM direct access to the system's hardware.
Secondly, I have 8 GB of system memory in my main system, and 4 GB is the minimum in all the rest. Firing up a VM with XP and devoting 1 GB of system memory to it will NOT affect performance of the host system. Once again, if you have been actually doing this yourself, you'd see that right in front of you. Again, don't play the "facts are facts" card, unless you are using facts. On my 8 GB system, I can run 4 separate VMs at the same time, and still be encoding video with Handbrake at the same rate I normally do....and this is with a simple Core2Duo.
Moving on, since we got the facts out above, show me a desktop quad-core processor that doesn't support VT?
Lastly, I keep my VMs backed up on a server, at home, and in the office. If my main system were to go down, I can copy these files to another computer, and in less than 60 seconds, have the VM up and running on that system. If I didn't have them backed up to a server, I could put them on an external USB drive. That's portability on a level that dual-boot systems can't even dream about. Tell me why VMWare's free ESXi product is so popular in the corporate world? Hyper-V? VMs are the here and now. Multi-booting is a thing of the past.
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New #18
DeaconFrost, your system specs are cool and one can only agree that with such specs there will be no issue running any VM on any platforms. There are those like myself that only have 2Gb of RAM. Going VM crazy with this amount is not on. Most people have work machines with alot of work apps which needed to be running due to compliancy rules and their machines are also limited in RAM.
Anyway about the practicality of having backups? What if your only machine is your laptop? the scenario here is that all of a sudden your mono-boot OS died and you need to get some doco done fast (you don't have time to build no OS). What are u going to do?
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New #19
That said, when your "system" died, having dual boot is not a guarantee that you are able to use the other OS. All depends on the type of damage. I have ghosted my Dual boot and applyed it to another machine, everythine when fine till when i tried to log onto w7 (W7 is not my original OS). It failed (something to do with boot file or maybe w7 just won't work when ghosted, i don't now) but my xp boot up fine. So i need to get files off my W7 partition and cannot boot into it. No worries, just boot to Xp.
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New #20
Up until the middle of this past year, I was running a Pentium D 820 with 2 GB of DDR memory, and that ran XP very very well in a VM. The only drawback was that I couldn't run multiple VMs at a time. My work system now is a Core2Duo 7300 (without VT), with 4 GB of memory, and I am able to run three VMs at once..XP, Server 2003, and Ubuntu Linux, without any real issues. Obviously, as with all things, the better the hardware, the better the performance.
Without backups in any situation, you are screwed. Going back to my example, you should be using an external USB drive if you only have a laptop. My wife switched to a laptop at home, and I keep a backup of her system (using TrueImage) stored on the USB drive. Once a month, we recreate that backup image. Once a week, she plugs in the external drive, runs SyncToy, and within a few minutes has all of her incremental data backed up as well. If I needed to restore her laptop, it would take roughly 15 minutes, and she would be back up and running. Once I finish building our new WHS box at home, that will handle back ups (very nicely I might add...WHS is great product) instead of this external drive.
The golden rule in backups is that you never store the backup on the same drive as the original. A dual boot system won't help you as a backup, especially if your hard drive fails. In the past, there were certain uses for a dual-boot system, but considering it a backup was never the case. If so, then I'd argue a BartPE disc of a Linux Live CD would also count as a backup, and could be run on any system, trumping your need for a dual-boot system.
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