Question about PC Hardware/OS Upgrade and VM for XP

phuschnickens

2 questions... will I get good performance and will it suck running ACT in a 32bit XP VM?

Explanation:

Doing an upgrade to my work PC. I use mostly Outlook '03, InDesign CS4, Excel '03, ACT 2006, whatever the current Quickbooks release is and some Acrobat work -- little bit of Photoshop CS4 and a tiny bit of Illustrator CS4. The CS4 work I do is miles away from graphic intensive. Mostly grayscale text layout for low-ish res print. I'm currently running 32bit XP. I'll be upgrading to 64-bit Windows 7... all of the programs I mentioned are compatible with 64-bit Windows 7 EXCEPT for ACT. The plan is to run a 32-bit XP VM for ACT 2006 with Parallels or VMWare and allocated 3GB to the VM. Will this be a successful-ish plan? What will overall performance be like with the following hardware?

ASRock H77 Pro4-M LGA 1155 Intel H77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard

Intel Core i3-2100 Sandy Bridge 3.1GHz LGA 1155 65W Dual-Core Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics 2000 BX80623I32100

G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-1600C9D-16GXM

Thanks in advance

Thrax

Performance will be fine. Having sufficient RAM matters most when running the XP VM in Win7.

midga

I am also curious about the success of running business software through VMs. I'd really like to be on Windows 7, but Rockwell is still a decade behind in their development >_>

phuschnickens

Thrax said:

Performance will be fine. Having sufficient RAM matters most when running the XP VM in Win7.

K cool... and I figure having 16GB total and 3.5 allocated to a 32bit XP VM which is going to be used only to run ACT 2006 is probably very sufficient. I am so excited to not be on a really sadly slow machine. My biggest remaining problem now is that Outlook crashes every hour... unfortunately I don't think that has anything to do with hardware... just bad software.

midga said:

I am also curious about the success of running business software through VMs. I'd really like to be on Windows 7, but Rockwell is still a decade behind in their development >_>

Not sure what your familiarity level is with VMWare but there's a view mode called "Unity" which allow apps running on the VM to almost seamlessly integrate into the host system... I'm not sure how well that will really work in day to day operation but sounds promising.

phuschnickens

Follow-up question... I'm considering doing an SSD for the OS and programs and using an HD for data storage. I'm trying to figure out if a 60GB SSD will suffice. I can't think of any reason it wouldn't based on the current setup I have. Anybody have experience using a small SSD combined with an HD for data storage?

Straight_Man

Folks have even used, somewhat technically difficultly unless you have special software, smaller SSDs for caching only and large HDDs. But, I would say 128 GB SSD for the way of use you seem to be hinting at.

phuschnickens

Got it. I've got a tight budget so may have to forego the SSD.

midga

You could easily use the 60 for your OS and some basic, main programs. You wouldn't be able to use it for all your games, but you could get a couple on there, so if you don't mind shuffling stuff around a bit when you're changing to a new big game, it might work out for you. I'm sure you could find someone to resell it to if you decide you don't like it.

phuschnickens

midga-

No games... work pc but I think everything you've said still applies. Adobe CS4 will fit and that's really most important. The rest can suffer.