Continouos Virtual Machine In Win 10

I had a win 7 machine recently had smart failures. Am getting a new drive for it. But for the time being I bought a replacement. It happens to be a Dell 'factory blemish'. New, with a 1 year warranty. I3, 8 gig, 1tb 64 bit of course. It's for my wife to use 'till the repair. She's not happy with the win 10 on it. She also wasn't happy with the Win 8.1 that I've been using now for a couple years. I put O&O Shut-Up and Classic Start's new version on it. She wants a few things not available in Win 10. I have a good Win 7 virtual machine. The thought is of putting this on it and let it run. She never connects to the internet and the only time her pc gets turned off is in a storm or other power outage. It may run for months at a time or at least until the '7 gets fixed.

Has anyone just let a vm run. I see some server virtual machines that I assume run until swapped out or took down for maintenance. Any drawbacks? Any thoughts?

I don't want to partition or add second drives as I have the year's warranty. All that can happen after the '7 is fixed or/and the year has passed.

 

I run a Windows 7 64bit pro VM.

I run virus scans on a portable flash drive setup.Basically a plug and play VM.Some times i let it run all day to scan systems.But the problem with Flash drives is you can't let them run too long.Now if you got a https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Digital-Notebook-SV300S3N7A-240G/dp/B00A1ZU00O/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1537004934&sr=8-4&keywords=Kingston+-+storage+enclosure

This drive should work fine.

I have one of these and works well.Now you could let this SSD run all day long..As long as you plug it into a 3.0 port you should have plenty of speed for a VM.Setting up a VM can be tricky some times.I have only done this once and haven't done it since.Be cause it's only used for a virus scan.

This is a pretty fast drive.I have one in my laptop and it boots in about 20 seconds.You could have some one install a VM setup on this usb SSD drive.

I actually have the UV400 SSD

I don't see way it would not work all day long.As long as it was not computer intensive.

My laptop stays on for a year at a time.So there should be no problem.

 

Not going to add any hardware. I'll use vmware (just saw you, Phil). I can increase the screen to practically overlay the '10 desktop.

Now that is what I'll expect and watch for - speed and performance. Just got into the weekend and she does visiting with a couple inmates on Sat/Sun so I have some time to dig out the software to put on the machine.

 

If you use VMWare, every now and then shut it down and compact the drive, sometimes it will give you gigs of space back.
But I run a Win 7 VM all the time with no issues, it is pretty stable.

 

I run VirtualBox (VM) and have done for at least 10 years.

It depends what you will be using the VM for? If for games then as Phillip said there will be a major hit in performance. Rendering videos works fine.

VMs are a bit tricky to set up but in the case of VirtualBox which is free, there is lots of info and guides (don't know about VMWare).

I am guessing that perhaps the Win7 machine which your partner was using was perhaps 32bit and that using Win10 64bit means that she can't install and run those (32bit progs) now?

Regarding your original drive with Smart failures, imo perhaps it would have been easier for you to have just cloned this using clonezilla.

Personally, I dislike Win10 immensely and remain with Win7 32bit (dual boot with XP) for which you can apply the PAE ram patch which allows the o/s to fully see and use more than 4GB of ram (my system has 8GB).

Good Luck

 

I've already installed vmware 14.x.x It's what I use. Never had a problem setting a vm. It will be used for watching video from dvd/cd, some light games and as a music player.
The '7 is an hp, 64 bit 4g ram with a smallish 225g hdd. Win 10 doesn't offer some of MS's own products through the years, so many functions or uses are handled by 3rd party software. A lot of what I have for software is from MajorGeeks (Thanks! MG) and are products of '7 and 8.1' era. The machine won't see the internet, so it is probably lacking as far as the performance and buggy issues of a basic '1o build.
I can still do as I wish with the failing drive. but that's another day. I do see locally that a decent ssd can be had for ~79$.

I have a '7 ultimate vm already, made under vmplayer 12. Used it in vmplayer 14. The software saw the move/copy and I may rebuild under this hardware before I'm thru. Still using '10, since the vm is still a work in progress.

My wife isn't going to one of her normal visitations today so I may be slowed down somewhat in getting it done. If the '7 gets fixed first, I will continue with this off to the side as a project and also to have a spare ready to go in case she or I need a replacement again in the future.

Thanks all for reading and replies.

 

Follow-up.......... the '7 is back in it's spot with a new 750gb hd. Most of the regularly used stuff back on it. Glad I had copy of all the installers or programs on thumb drives, so not much work involved and fairly quick up and running. Wound up with 500 gbyte more and a fresh '7 pro sp1 install for 79$ + tax.
So the '10 is a spare now. The 7 ult runs in VMWare good. On it now. The wireless is as good as my straight '8.1. I don't even see the '10 when in full screen. I'm using Opera, no IE or Edge here. Have sound and video going. Speed is on par with my old pc even though it's a vm. One game I often play is '13 days in he--'. Ran at 25 frames on the old and the same here in VMWare.

My next try is to get it to start up with VMWare loaded and running the '7 automatically. So if I boot or restart after a power failure it's where I want it.

This has a dell wireless built in. I have it set to 'metered' to skip the updates as much as possible. I also have a wnda4100 dongle and it doesn't support Win10. So I'm gonna set it in the VM and disable the in-built so I can control the '10's wireless usage.

The old hd in the '7 started giving 'smart' imminient warnings and it only lasted about 2 weeks after. So if you get these, pay attention!

 

LOL, is this the myth of the elusive sasquatch PAE patch, or the real thing ? Very curious to hear but dubious of this idea. BTW, wouldn't this work with Vista/W7, etc. too if it works with XP?

 

Nothing elusive or dubious about the Win7 32bit PAE ram patch. I run a Gigabyte GA970A DS3P dual boot with XP and Win7 with 8GB ram.

On Win7 32 bit with the PAE patch the o/s can see and use all 8GB of ram (just google paepatch or paepatch2). Need to be a little careful with this patch as if you run an Nvidia vga, which I do (MSI GTX 660), then anything greater than driver v331.82 will corrupt the patch.

https://wj32.org/wp/2013/10/25/pae-patch-updated-for-windows-8-1/

The above link states it will work with Win 8/10, tho' have not tried.

On XP, there is no way to apply any kind of ram patch whatsoever on 32 bit system, but an adequate alternative can be used by way of using the Gavotte ram patch, or indeed any prog which can create a virtual ramdisk (ImDisk is excellent too, I use it in Win 7) which turn the ram above approx 3.3GB into a virtual ramdisk drive. Can place the swap / page file on it as an example. My Gavotte ramdisk drive on XP is 4.7GB.

https://techjourney.net/free-ramdisk-for-windows-7-vista-xp-2000-server-2003-2008-gavotte/

https://www.raymond.cc/blog/12-ram-disk-software-benchmarked-for-fastest-read-and-write-speed/

Happy reading

Good Luck

 

I like this idea. If a ramdisk program can see the extra memory, then it can be used like an SSD. I would love to experiment with this kind of setup. For now, I don't have an 8 GB XP system. I have one with a mb that will use 8 GB, but it only has 4 for now. Of course, it has 4 1 GB sticks lol, meaning they will all have to be replaced with 2 GB sticks ...

Thanks very much for the information. The NVidia information is great. If you get a chance, I am curious if the v331.82 driver for NVidia a magic number for all of they're drivers. For example, is this same number applied to 7 (760,770 etc.) series cards, etc...

 

Some legacy computers can not run windows XP.Because the software is outdated.

 

If you go to the first link I posted and read down into the posts, you will see that 331.82 is the last one for any Nvidia vga. Apparently, Nvidia changed some of the coding for later drivers and broke the patch for Win7. That was as at May 2018 when I last read that thread and built my new system. Perhaps things will change in time.

If you have an XP 32bit system which I presume you do, then you can still use either of the ramdisk drive progs I gave you even with 4GB of ram. This will allow you to access about 700Mb of higher memory that XP cannot access and you can play with it.

Both of those progs are very small and easy to install and remove. They will both create a separate volume in My Computer with a drive letter (that you can change if you want). You can say partially move your page file to it and leave the rest in your main drive (C:\). If you have a HDD (not SSD) then may be worth it.

Golden rule image first.

Good Luck

Of course you are correct, that is why I picked this particular Gigabyte mobo (AM3+). I has the necessary chipset driver available to include AHCI driver for XP in order to optimally run my 500GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD as my boot drive.

Cheers

 

Here's more info.
https://www.raymond.cc/blog/make-windows-7-and-vista-32-bit-x86-support-more-than-4gb-memory/