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On 12/27/2012 04:24 PM, Jerry Feldman wrote: > Looking more at Dave's situation, IMHO, Dave might be better off running > Windows in a virtual machine. The advantages are: > 1. The VM can be backed up during normal Linux backups and easily > restored. > 2. You can take snapshots to reduce boot time. > 3. VMs are portable. You can stick a VM on a USB drive and run it from > another computer. You can take a Virtualbox and move it to VMWare and > vice-versa with a bit of effort. > 4. As in Mark's #1, since the physical system is the virtual container, > it does not care about the physical world. > 5. VMWare and VirtualBox provide methods to convert an existing physical > machine to virtual. (PtoV). This way you can take your physically > installed Windows and convert them to a virtual container. VMWare has a > free tool you can use for this. > > There are some disadvantages of virtual machines. > 1. Graphics is limited, so if you are using Windows for a high > performance graphical system, then VM is not for you > 2. Performance of a VM is going to be less than that if it is native. > With today's multi-core processors this is not muc of an issue. > But this makes a much better backup solution Up until recently, that's exactly what I was doing. My *only* uses for Windows were to back up/sync my iPhone and remote desktop into work. Syncing with iTunes running in a VM often went badly, but not often enough to stop me from doing it. What has changed is that - My main laptop died [1] and I replaced it with a much beefier one that can do real work, so now I have a dual boot powerful laptop. I wouldn't have replaced the laptop right away, but I wanted to get one before they even started thinking about shipping them with Windows 8. - I'm now gaming [2] every month or so with my coworkers, and sometimes on my own. I built a powerful gaming rig that is dual boot, and I decided to use the Linux side of it as my main machine instead of a laptop. I'm VERY happy with that decision. So using Windows in a VM *may* work for *some* games, but it's not really the way to go. After seeing everyone's great comments (including "install Linux"), I've come to the realization that I'm probably best off doing a very occasional mirror image of Windows, and use Unison to copy off my documents that change. Maybe I'll have to reinstall windows, maybe the image will restore. The only for-pay applications installed on either Windows box is MS Office, and my Steam games which will reinstall themselves with no problems. Thanks for all the great advice. [1] The screen backlight died, but the rest of the laptop works. It's 5 years old though, so I'm not going to replace the backlight. I'll probably hook it up to a TV as a MythTV client. [2] Halo, Counter Strike, Torchlight II, Portal, Left 4 Dead, and a few others. dj_segfault on Steam.
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