How strange

[Workingman]

I wanted to install Win XP on my laptop so that I could have a dual boot system. but the installation kept giving me the blue screen of death. Looking round the 'net it appears that my very old version of XP - pre SP1 - will not run on my multi-core processor machine.

However........

I have installed Oracle Virtual Machine and now have it running as Virtual XP in W7. It is not exactly what I wanted, but I can live with it. Then I started getting hooked and now have two Linux machines as well - Isotope and Zorin.

So, from being frustrated at not getting XP installed I now have four computers on the same machine...... should come in handy.

[Suff]

Hi WM,

I recall having the exact same problem with Windows95, in that it just would not install on later machines.

I have been using VMware workstation since V2 (now V9). VirtualBox did not exist then and VMware pioneered the virtual machine space. I used to use it to install Linux distro's back in the late 90's so that I could manage Unix machines with Unix tools.

It is only when you get into the world of virtual machines with operating systems which are not so heavy on the hardware as Windows is, that you realise just how powerful Vista and Windows7 have forced hardware to be in order to give good performance. Even entry level Laptops are Massively more powerful than the standard XP machine even from 2006. Hardware has not followed an evolutionary path, as it did with XP which was at least as fast as Windows98 at release. So XP did not drive the hardware changes that Vista did.

Whilst people curse Vista as an abomination, it did a job and that was to move us on. 3D graphics hardware in new machines bears no comparison to the XP genre. It's like comparing hardware designed for DOS with hardware designed for WindowsXP.

I had one primary goal with my new (monster) laptop. Namely that I could use virtual machines of a set OS version (W7) on top of an OS which could change without impacting my working life. So my Laptop is now W8, I could upgrade it without worrying about the software on my main VM as it was W7. So I could go to work, start whatever operating system was on my laptop (possibly even Linux) and then work on my work "computer" the Virtual Machine which is my main working platform.

That is not quite working the way I want. I upgraded my Laptop to 32 GB RAM last week only to find that the performance issue I had been seeing was around the stupid Dell power supply and the laptop throttling performance when it was not able to charge... In order to finally get the performance I wanted, I need to buy a 500GB SATA drive to replace the hybrid drive. This is not, yet, happening as prices are still too volatile and they are still too expensive (circa £300).

The biggest change, of course, is what they call "bare metal" virtual machines. Until you see 12 Windows 2003 servers running on one IBM 8 core server box with 22GB of RAM (on VM being an oracle db server), running on top of VMware ESX, it doesn't really break through just how much hardware has changed over the last decade.

BTW, ESXi5 is free for single cpu up to 8 cores. There are utils to patch the install iso for consumer network adapters and it makes for very useful "server" class instances on cheap hardware.

Makes life more interesting anyway.

[Workingman]

Suff, the reason for all this is because I am hoping to do some volunteer work in the community, and much of it will be 1-2-1 with older or poorer people. I figured that many will still be using XP with some on Linux of some sort.

I skipped 98/ME and went straight to XP. For similar reasons, the step change in hardware and the core OS, I skipped Vista for W7. In both cases it meant that the learning curve was steeper, but there is always a price to pay. W8 is on the Toshiba, but I do not expect to come up against it too often.

VirtualBox is a good piece of kit and with the different OSes I should be able to work in real time - telling and doing - alongside those I am helping.

[Suff]

Very good WM. Glad to hear you found something you wanted to do.

Yes it will work very well for that. Version 4.x has made great strides and the patronship of Oracle has helped rather than hindered.

Well enjoy...