For a while doing work for a vendor I offloaded a build image into a vm, and just used a virtualbox as a corporate image in windoze 7, complete with all the security/spyware installed, which actually would tax the underlying host some.  Using it with virtualbox, I'd just lower the execute cap on it some, and twice a day when their spyware would kick off and start scanning the host system, while killing the 2 cores I gave it, the host experienced no degradation what so ever. 

Great part is now I didn't need a physical "vendor laptop", I just cloned the image between my desktop and laptop, using them mutually exclusively one at a time.  Oddly windoze domain never seemed to.figure it out I was gaming it.

I weened myself off windoze gaming long ago for needing native gpu access, so there's no reason at all it's can't simply live in VM I've found in the past 10 years, and too many reasons FOR doing keeping windoze virtual-only.

As I said earlier, usually my biggest resource contention is ram.  I find using linux as a desktop it's not uncommon to be using 20-25gb of ram (chrome+chromium+firefox+libreoffice) after a few weeks of uptime with normal usage, so firing up a vm would occasionally oom and wreak havoc on things.  Make sure you have enough ram to cover linux AND windoze.

-mb



On 04/19/2016 02:07 PM, Stephen Partington wrote: