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PC Construction

Black Hole

Black Hole

May contain traces of nut
I have an ambition to build a new PC. I could just buy one, and I've thought about it as a quick solution, but then I will always be slightly dissatisfied.

This situation could trickle on practically forever, were it not for my Celeron Win7 notebook showing signs of age (at the very least needing an OS rebuild), and my intention to stick with Win7 being hampered by MS having announced they are going to stop new installations very soon. My plan is to use some form of Linux on a new PC, and run Win7 installed in a VM (I will need to buy a licence for Win7, and some kind of installation media).

I guess the Win7 bit is now critical, and what I ought to do is swap another HDD into my notebook and install Linux on it, then create a Win7 VM as a baseline. I had better go hunting for installation media (the notebook came with Win7 pre-installed - can I re-use the licence?).

As far as the PC hardware is concerned, I am frankly confused by all the options - and now there is the Ryzen in the mix. What I want is a satisfyingly high performance machine for 3D CAD and video encoding, without spending a ridiculous amount of money (and I am not a gamer). My guess is that a quad core i7 with a half reasonable graphics card to off-load video processing to a GPU will do the business at speeds I have never seen before (I think back to my Amstrad 1640 taking days to produce a Mandelbrot image).

There's a lot more for me to say, but for the moment I throw the floor open...
 
It is a few years since I did this, but it isn't hard. You should look seriously at w10, though, it really is very good.

There are several programs to extract your w7 license and save it.

https://www.lifewire.com/free-product-key-finder-programs-2625119

It will be an oem, and you can't use that to download media from m$, but I still have a w7 cd I could rip and send you if you want. Or rip an iso.

VM may be slow, I never had much luck with that. I understand w10 does not close down when it needs activation, it just loses a few features!
 
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VM should be OK with a modern processor and hardware virtualisation support! At least as fast as my Celeron anyway. I'm planning to do most stuff in Linux.

Your offer of a rip is appreciated.
 
Black Hole said:
VM should be OK with a modern processor and hardware virtualisation support! At least as fast as my Celeron anyway. I'm planning to do most stuff in Linux.

Your offer of a rip is appreciated.
Click to expand...

I bought a copy of windows7 from Currys to upgrade a Dell XP desktop a few years ago that was having problems hoping a clean slate would solve the problems but it was beyond help so I just bought a Win7 laptop, I didnt even register it with MS so the serial number
is still usable to you. Maybe we can do a deal. Do you have an Amazon account by any chance? I dont and I want some copper rivets from there for a little project. If its of use to you let me know how many £ worth of rivets its worth to you. Bit busy for the next couple of days so may not answer your reply till the weekend.
 
Go for trog's offer.

I haven't tried virtualization for a couple of years but it was useless last time I tried and all the software I wanted to use would not work. That was on a 4 core i7.

Dual booting is good, though.
 
Just installed oracle VirtualBox (free) running XP on Win 10 (i7/ssd hardware). Very impressed. VirtualBox is also supposed to run on unix, OS X, etc. And host unix, etc.
Worth a try.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
Black Hole said:
That's not good news :(
Click to expand...
Ignore it unless he can post something specific. "all the software I wanted to use would not work" is about as useless a comment as it's possible to get.
All the software I use works fine (I'm using Virtualbox on Mint with an i5) and have had about 15 VMs running simultaneously (could do with a bit more RAM!) whilst doing stuff (using GNS3 and such like).
 
Mike0001 said:
I haven't tried virtualization for a couple of years but it was useless last time I tried and all the software I wanted to use would not work. That was on a 4 core i7.
Click to expand...
I use virtualisation a fair bit using VirtualBox and it works well for me. I have a Win 10 virtual machine on top of a Win 10 host to cope with a Microsoft oddity; a Win XP machine to run one very ancient piece of software and a couple of Linux virtual machines. All works well for me but it will depend on the software you are trying to run. Can you tell us what programs you were trying to run?
Dual booting is good, though.
Click to expand...
Yes several of my boxes are set up for dual booting between Windows and Linux and that also works well but is not as convenient in some circumstances.
 
At the time, I was trying to update my satnav. Wasn't recognised. None of my dvd and video programs would install and run. I could not configure my harmony remotes, so in the end I went back to dual booting. The graphics card was a problem too, it was a dual Intel and Geforce one which Windows could handle but Virtualization could not.
 
Anything that tries to access hardware outside the virtualised environment is bound to be problematic. I expect better things of "self contained" computing, such as running a word processor (one of my target usages is to spawn a Win7 VM and install Office 2003 in it).
 
I run W10 in Virtualbox under Mint. The W10 licence is the one the machine inherited when it upgraded from its original W7 and it hasn't complained (so far) about its validity. The W10 install is there purely to run Photoshop: in every other respect dropping Windows in favour of Linux was the best thing I've done in ages.
 
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