Windows 7 dual boot with Linux

[Mark Phillips]

Michael,

I can only give you two data points. I am sure there is a lot of
information on the Internet about this topic.

My old laptop was a Dell Vostro 1520. It had a Core Duo P7570 2.26 GHz
processor, 8 GB of RAM, and a 7200 rpm hard disk. It struggled a little to
run vmplayer with Windows 7 Home and other Linux applications. It really
slowed down when I opened libreoffice, eclipse, tomcat7, chrome, firefox,
and vmplayer. I was running Debian testing as the host OS. Each OS had one
core, and Windows had 2 GB allocated. In a dual boot scenario, the
performance of both Windows and Debian was excellent.

My new laptop is a System 76 Gazelle with a i7-4910MQ processor, 16 GB of
RAM and a 1TB SSD. I still have Windows 7 Home running in vmplayer. I have
yet to be able to slow it down with any combination of applications and
vmplayer. The host OS is Ubuntu 14.04. I even struggle to get the fan to
come on....;)

A wild guess would be at least an i5 and 10 GB of RAM, but I could be way
off. I am sure there are others on the list who are much wiser than me on
this topic.

I think the easiest thing to do (at the install fest or at home) would be
to install Linux as the host OS and vmplayer with Windows and try it. A
good test would be how much the system slows down when Windows goes through
its first big update after the installation. If the performance is not that
great in the particular configuration you want to use with your computer,
then remove the vmplayer and install Windows in a dual boot scenario.

Mark

On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 5:42 PM, Michael Havens <bmike1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> How much RAM is enough? How much should you allocate to windows? How much
> does Linux need? Mint17.1 is running currently using 2.3G with a terminal
> open and Chrome with 2 tabs open.
>
> :-)~MIKE~(-:
>
> On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 5:07 PM, Mark Phillips <mark at phillipsmarketing.biz
> > wrote:
>
>> George,
>>
>> if your computer has enough horsepower and ram, I would suggest not
>> setting up a dual boot system, but instead run Windows in a vm - vmplayer
>> or virtualbox. I have used dual booting with Linux and Windows for a long
>> time, but once I started running windows in a vm, I was much happier. Fewer
>> headaches and easier to switch between the two operating systems. Also
>> easier to share data between the two operating systems.
>>
>> Just my two cents.
>>
>> Mark
>> On Jan 12, 2015 8:18 AM, "Matt Graham" <mhgraham at crow202.org> wrote:
>>
>>> On 2015-01-12 03:54, kitepilot at kitepilot.com wrote:
>>>
>>>> Clone your Window$ with:
>>>> mount -tntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1
>>>> (cd /mnt/sda1;tar cf - .)|(cd /mnt/sdb1;tar xf -)
>>>>
>>>
>>> I thought that NTFS had a number of things like non-Unixy file
>>> permissions and alternate file streams that tar is not aware of and can't
>>> replicate.  I also thought that Windows still has a few things that require
>>> absolute sector positions, like the swapfile.  If it's possible to back up
>>> a Windows-on-NTFS drive with mount and tar, that's great--but I thought it
>>> was unlikely.
>>>
>>> I have usually used partimage to back up and restore Windows
>>> partitions.  That works.  The downside is that it only does a partition at
>>> a time....
>>>
>>> --
>>> Crow202 Blog: http://crow202.org/wordpress
>>> There is no Darkness in Eternity
>>> But only Light too dim for us to see.
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