As I've said elsewhere I'm thinking of buying a new system unit to run Linux (probably Slackware) and Win2k as a virtual machine.
I think I'll probably go for a dual-core processor as they seem to have reduced to sensible prices now. What's the current thinking as to which is best value for money between the AMD Dual core processors and the Intel Core 2 Duo ones?
Is there anything else fundamental that will affect the performance (well obviously there is!) that I may miss? I don't need anything super whizzy in the graphics department as I don't play any games, good 'business' graphics is all I need. So a big fast disk drive and lots of memory seem to be the other obvious requirements.
Any/all suggestions welcome.
On 07-Sep-06 cl@isbd.net wrote:
As I've said elsewhere I'm thinking of buying a new system unit to run Linux (probably Slackware) and Win2k as a virtual machine.
I think I'll probably go for a dual-core processor as they seem to have reduced to sensible prices now. What's the current thinking as to which is best value for money between the AMD Dual core processors and the Intel Core 2 Duo ones?
Is there anything else fundamental that will affect the performance (well obviously there is!) that I may miss? I don't need anything super whizzy in the graphics department as I don't play any games, good 'business' graphics is all I need. So a big fast disk drive and lots of memory seem to be the other obvious requirements.
In deed. If you're using VMWare, then ample RAM is a prime requirement, since each instance of a VM that you start up will have a chunk of RAM exclusively reserved for it.
I've been running Win98 very successfully in VMWare for years, on a machine with 512MB, allocating 256MB for Win98. That's OK for Win98, but I wonder how adequate it would be for the bigger and b****r later versions of Windows. And that leaves only 256MB for VMWare itself, as well as any other Linux apps I may want to run at the same time.
Best wishes, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 07-Sep-06 Time: 12:28:33 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
On Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 12:28:38PM +0100, Ted Harding wrote:
On 07-Sep-06 cl@isbd.net wrote:
As I've said elsewhere I'm thinking of buying a new system unit to run Linux (probably Slackware) and Win2k as a virtual machine.
I think I'll probably go for a dual-core processor as they seem to have reduced to sensible prices now. What's the current thinking as to which is best value for money between the AMD Dual core processors and the Intel Core 2 Duo ones?
Is there anything else fundamental that will affect the performance (well obviously there is!) that I may miss? I don't need anything super whizzy in the graphics department as I don't play any games, good 'business' graphics is all I need. So a big fast disk drive and lots of memory seem to be the other obvious requirements.
In deed. If you're using VMWare, then ample RAM is a prime requirement, since each instance of a VM that you start up will have a chunk of RAM exclusively reserved for it.
I've been running Win98 very successfully in VMWare for years, on a machine with 512MB, allocating 256MB for Win98. That's OK for Win98, but I wonder how adequate it would be for the bigger and b****r later versions of Windows. And that leaves only 256MB for VMWare itself, as well as any other Linux apps I may want to run at the same time.
I was thinking of a system with 2Gb of memory, for example Cyberia Systems do a base unit with dual core 4200 AMD processor, 2Gb of memory and two 320Gb disks for around £450. That's the sort of ball park I'm looking at.
Does anyone sell ready built Shuttle/Biostar systems?
On Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 11:54:23AM +0100, cl@isbd.net wrote:
I think I'll probably go for a dual-core processor as they seem to have reduced to sensible prices now. What's the current thinking as to which is best value for money between the AMD Dual core processors and the Intel Core 2 Duo ones?
You might want to go Intel as you were talking about VMWare, but if you get an Intel cpu with the right support you should be able to virtualise Windows with Xen. If you care about using Free Software over VMWare then I'd consider going with something that should work with Xen check these 2 links for more information http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/IntelVT & the Xen FAQ http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenFaq (FWIW I've not run Xen and don't own any of the Intel hardware with VT support so I've not tried it, but if I was going to get new hardware this would be it).
Adam
-
Adam Bower -
cl＠isbd.net -
Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk