Virtualbox preferred setup

[chiefjim]

I have VB installed on my Mint 14 Mate system. Using my existing copy of XP for a test I'm not overly impressed with the results.

I suspect though that the primary culprit is my hardware. Soon I'm looking to upgrade my nearly 4 year old AMD Athlon II X3 425 running on a Gigabyte GA-MA785GM-US2H with 4 GB installed memory. Using the onboard video as well makes me believe that 4 GB simply isn't enough.

Curious where the sweet spot lies hardware wise so that VB doesn't struggle. I'm not exactly a gamer but would appreciate being able to play with MS Flight Simulator once again.

Sweet spot includes not hurting the wallet too much as well.

[cwsnyder]

I suspect that you don't give enough resources to your Windows client. If you want to play even Flight Simulator on Windows XP, you should have 20G virtual hard disk space minimum, 2G RAM and 1 or 2 processors before you turn on video acceleration to allow for a fair gaming experience. This might hamper your Mint experience at the same time you have your VM running, but then, you will hardly be playing Flight Simulator while simultaneously working on a 20 page LibreOffice document and have a browser open with 10+ tabs.

[chiefjim]

Resources being the original reason behind my posting. When I sought to assign more memory I got warnings about how doing so might effect stability.

[cwsnyder]

VirtualBox does not like to assign more than 1/2 of your total memory or processor resources to the client over the host OS. You can run into problems with supporting your hypervisor software. On the other hand, Windows XP was sold on machines with 256M RAM, and I had a '95 dual core machine with Windows XP Media Center Edition on which the motherboard maxed out at 2G RAM. You can't tell me ANY XP software can't run in less than 2G RAM, unless it specifically states the requirement before installation. Windows XP Home never supported 32-bit PAE or 64-bit processors, either. Newer Windows XP software would support multi-processors, but older software didn't even support that extension.

You would probably be better off by getting an nVidia or ATI graphics card which is supported under Linux proprietary drivers, loading the Guest Additions in the Windows Guest and enabling 3D acceleration for the guest.