--- On Mon, 7/30/12, William H. TeBrake <tebrake@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Jordan, > > I have both Win XP and Linux Ubuntu running within UMWare > Player on my Win 7 (64 bit) machine with 8 gigs of memory. > But, just for the fun of it, I also loaded VMWare Player on > my slowly aging Win XP laptop with 2 gigs of memory, and > Ubuntu runs quite well within that space. You should be able > to run something like DOS or Win 3.1 within 512 megs or less > within VMWare. Give it a try. It's free for the Player > edition, and it uninstalls quite cleanly if you don't like. > I did dual booting in the past, between Windows and OS/2, > but I like the VMWare approach because it just seems to work > for me without having to reboot. > William, Depending on which computer we're talking about, I have anywhere from 3.5 G. to 8G. of RAM installed. My question was more about the power of the CPU. That also affects VM performance -- a lot. In these days of i3 / i5 / i7, I'm well behind the curve with the older, moderate dual-cores. (AMD x2 Athlons, or their Intel contemporaries.) After reading various comments here, I'm leaning towards this VMware Player, rather than Virtual PC or the others. (No one mentioned VirtualBox . . . . ) I had been a proponent of dual-boot setups, but XP seems to have just bugged out on my main laptop. It goes off to a black screen La-La Land at bootup. I know it's not the hardware, because the alternate boot -- eCS -- is still working fine. So, I'm looking at an XP "repair install", and hoping this won't lose all the updates and security fixes etc. etc. accumulated over the last few years. I think that is claimed to be the case (?), but I've never tried it. The VM thing is starting to look a lot more appealing. But, I really don't want to give up eCS. (That's the OS/2 successor.) As far as I knew, VirtualBox was the only virtualizer that did OS/2 . . . but I think it had to be the Host and XP had to be the client. Jordan