To dual boot or not...

[Guest richard]

I'm thinking of rebuilding my laptop as its getting a little sluggish at the moment and am in two minds about dual booting it. At present it runs XP Pro sp2 and is mainly used for work purposes at one of my schools as well as private jobs.

 

I am trying to get away from using Windows as much as possible at home and at work but there are times when I need to use it. I have dual booted in the past but have always found it a bit of an inconvienence to have to reboot boot to use 1 program for 20 mins. I have thought about using something like VMware but have had no experience of setting this up before (haveing always used Virtual PC in the past).

 

If anyone has been down this road before I would like to hear your experiences before I go ahead and do this.

[CyberNerd]

I started dual booting my home PC before I completely switched to linux - I have a Citrix connection to school if I need windows.

Now my school Desktop is Ubuntu (I spent about a year on SuSE and the last 6months on Ubuntu) and I have XP in VMWare.

If your laptop can't handle VWWare, using an RDP connection to musthave Windows Apps is a good choice.

 

Only minor issues I've had with vmware is that after a kernel update vm requires the kernel headers be downloaded

 apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` 

and a re-run of vmware-config.pl

[Guest richard]

The laptop is a Celeron M 1.5GHz with 1 gig of ddr2 ram. At present 128mb is allocated for graphics but I can lower that. Also I for got to say that it has a 100 gig hdd in it as well.

[CyberNerd]

should be fine for a minimal XP install.

[Guest richard]

The only real reason need xp is if I'm required to sort out problems with existing files such as publisher or need to use a bit of windows only software. I tend to run a fairly minimal version of xp on the laptop any way.

[linuxgirlie]

I had the exact same problem as you when I needed Windows for an OU course, so I used VMware on Linux with a Windows Virtual PC.

 

Which way are you looking at going? Linux with Windows or Windows with Linux? I have found that on Windows (2K anyway) VMware slows the PC down alot, so at work we had to manually turn it off and on when needed. On Linux I haven't had this problem and the service seems to sit in the background fine.

 

You shouldn't have problems running VMware on you laptop though, we have run it on similar specs, the only thing you will have to look out for is how many applications you use, we found that on slower machines, we could have a couple native running, and the same virtual, anymore and the machine became un-useable.

 

Jo

[Guest richard]

I'm seriously looking at installing Linux (probably PCLinux OS) and running Windows via VMware.