JDPFu.com 2025

So mein laptop ist kaput. It fell about 16" to the carpet and never worked again. The disk drive seems ok – I’ve pulled all the data from it already. I also had a backup from the night prior to this accident stored on another server here.

I purchased a new laptop using a huge discount" – it should be blazing fast; core 2 duo, 4GB ram, 320gb drive. It has more memory than either of my servers! The only issues is Vista-64bit. The suckage is high.

Anyway, that’s how I got where a virtual machine setup became necessary. WinXP is the right answer for a business, not Vista and certainly not Vista-64 bit. When I first booted this laptop, I was shocked on how slow this new machine was. It really was slow. Simply amazing. I shutdown as many services, set the desktop to “classic mode” and installed antivirus software.

So, which Virtual Machine Host should you use?

Virtual Machines, VMs, are a good answer for running other operating systems without a big commitment in hardware or disk. Google will help you understand them better.

There are a large number of VM hosts out there. I’ve used many of them. Most for just a few hours, but occasionally for months. We will only worry about x86 compatible VM hosts, not that IBM, HP, and Sun don’t make excellent VMs. I’ve personally used VPAR, NPAR, LPAR, Containers and Domains – they work within the fairly minor limitations. x86 VM Hosts are mostly free for personal use and some can be used in a business for free too.

That’s enough setup in the next article. I’ll go into these VM Hosts in the next.

• Xen
• VMWare Server
• VMWare ESXi
• MS-Virtual PC
• Sun VirtualBox

Part 2