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Development with virtual Windows 7

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  • 12-02-2012 2:48pm
    #1
    murphaph
    Registered Users Posts: 19,019 ✭✭✭✭


    Hi all,
    my old work laptop was nicked and I got a nice new one on Friday. The new one is a good deal quicker than the old one:
    Lenovo core i5 2.5Ghz (shows up as 4 cores in Linux?), 8GB ram, 500GB hard disk.

    It came preinstalled with OEM Windows 7, which is what was on my old work laptop. I always just used it because I do frontend stuff and need to be able to at least check the results in Windows versions of IE, FF etc. (stuff never looks the same even in FF or Chrome on Linux).

    Because I have to also login to test servers etc with SSH, it was a bit of a pain having to use puTTy (no native SSH support in Windows and cygwin caused me other problems). Lots of handy *nix commands have been unavailable and a bit annoying.

    So, I got the laptop and immediately set about backing it up so in the worst case scenario I can give it back to the IT desk as I got it. I then formatted the drive and set about creating a dual boot machine as I have at home (older pentium laptop, just have Windows for the odd thing that doesn't exist in Linux), with 2 OS partitions, swap partition and shared data (Ntfs) partition, accessible by both OSes.

    I then started to wonder, what with my new laptop being actually much better and supporting hardware based virtualisation (vx-t or whatever Intel calls it), do I actually need a real W7 installation? I am currently installing W7 under Virtualbox to see how nippy it is. At work I really only need W7 to check browser results-all development will be done in Eclipse on Linux, so I can strip out all the crap I don't need and just install a suite of browsers on the virtual W7 instance.

    I'm gonna give it a go for 30 days until i have to validate my virtual W7 instance, then if it works out, repartition the hard drive and remove the "machine installed" W7 completely, using the licence for the virtual instance (MS says these are 2 different machines, stupidly requiring 2 licences, even though it's the same OS on the same hardware)

    Are any of you guys working this way? Is it practical? Does it negatively impact on your host OS (Linux) at all?

    I also looked into just installing Wine but read to many stories about IE crashing.


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    #2
    conor.hogan.2
    Registered Users Posts: 5,246 ✭✭✭conor.hogan.2


    If you are just using it to check if IE (and other browsers) look well on Windows then it is a perfect reason to not have a full install.

    If you have the harddrive space I would have a small partition and a VM for if you ever need a full install though.


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