On 2013-08-03 3:59 PM, BOB KLAHN -> ROSS CASSELL wrote:   
      
    BK>>>  Well, that is step one. I was hoping the virtual machine would   
    BK>>>  be faster. That and avoid excess writes to the SD card   
      
    RC>> It would help that you would know what a VM is.   
      
    RC>> A VM is a emulated environment, what is being emulated is   
    RC>> hardware, Hdd's are created using very big files, the VM   
    RC>> borrows free memory from the host. A netbook has hardly the   
    RC>> desired horsepower to run a VM.   
      
    BK>   What kinda specs does it take with XP?   
      
   Remember, you need to have enough RAM on the system to run two operating   
   systems at the same time - the host (what the computer boots to) plus the   
   guest OS (running within a virtual machine).   
      
   So to boot a netbook to a Linux distribution and then run WinXP in a   
   virtualizer such as VirtualBox you'll need enough RAM for Linux + enough to   
   allow Win XP to run adequately.   
      
   Many netbooks come with 1 GB of RAM and no option to expand this - that MIGHT   
   work assuming the Linux version can run happily with, say 512 MB and assigning   
   the rest to XP... but it will be tight.   
      
   Moreover, the Atom processor used on netbooks is pretty low-horsepower at   
   best; the result may work - I suspect at least as well as running XP on a   
   Pentium III back in the day.   
      
   --- Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:15.0) Gecko/20120907 Thunde   
    * Origin: Fidonet Via Newsreader - http://www.easternstar.info (1:123/789.0)