Subj : Virtual Machines
To   : ALL
From : BOB KLAHN
Date : Thu Jul 25 2013 12:41:10


 Ok, here's the problem. Or, rather question.

 I have a netbook, bought at a garage sale very cheap. The hard
 drive was missing, and new hard drives for that are very
 expensive. Solid state drive.

 I have known about virtual computing for a long time, but never
 got into it. What I am thinking of is, using an SD card as my
 hard drive, setting it up to boot to XP, then running it as a
 virtual machine.

 What I don't know is, does the virtual machine run completely in
 ram, or run off the HD? If it runs out of ram that should
 drastically reduce the write cycles to the SD card, thus
 prolonging it's life. OTOH, even writing to the SD card may be
 worth it, I can buy a dozen or two SD cards for the price of one
 SSD.

 The problem with that is, SD cards are not as fast as SSDs, or
 even ordinary hard drives. So, if running in ram it should be
 very fast. Is it?

 This will be used for a very limited selection of tasks, web
 browsing when out of the house, limited word processing, maybe
 video or audio. I suspect I could save files to a cloud server,
 but I don't want to get into Google Chrome OS. I want my
 programs on the local system because the Web actually is rather
 slow by comparison, esp when you are sharing a bookstore or
 restaurant connection.

 So, what is other's experience with this, and does anyone have
 any recommendations on how to do this as easily as possible.

 Oh and I have booted it to Puppy Linux, which does work, but I
 also have the restore CD for this and would like, at least, to
 have a working system for this.

BOB KLAHN bob.klahn@sev.org   http://home.toltbbs.com/bobklahn

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