Have you considered a hardware upgrade and switching to a virtual OS workflow? It sounds like it might be worth your time to consider.
I have a 4 year old AMD cpu (not sure which one), 16 GB RAM (cost about $80) and SSD (best upgrade in years)
my bare metal OS is win8, on which I have minimal software installed. I use multiple VMware images for software I don't use often or which installs too much cruft which I don't like slowing down my machine.
For example, I only need VS occasionally. For some reason even a minimal install of VS comes along with 10s of MS service packs SQL server IIS etc. Basically junk that I don't need. So now it lives in a VM that I might fire up once in a while.
Benefits of a VM:
-- Easy backups
-- Snapshots
On a mid range system VMware works flawlessly and gives seamless access to host resources such as networking and USB etc.
Running a XP VM would offer multiple benefits such as access to your old software and VM sandboxing for security issues that go along with running an EOLd OS
I understand virtual machines from my old IBM days, but
so far I have yet to do anything with them on PCs. Likely for my startup, as the work moves along (today made good progress on some de/serialization issues -- wrote some small test programs that showed that de/serialization was working
like it should; now to find out why it was not working
in the code of a Web page talking to one of my 'servers',
now just software on the same computer but intended to be
on a separate computer, TCP/IP communications in both cases).
The sand boxing security sounds good. Maybe in practice for years VMs are the only easy path we have to
security from 'malware', etc.
Have you considered a hardware upgrade and switching to a virtual OS workflow?
I intend to buy a second computer fairly soon. I will install the copy of Windows 7 Professional I already have and then get used to the computer, arrange that each of my computers can copy backup files to the other one. And/or get a hard drive connected vis USB and some appropriate software, or maybe just use XCOPY or WinZip.
With two computers, if one of them is down for some reason, then I can still get to the Internet with the other one.
The second computer will also be the first server for
my startup, to go live fairly soon -- the software is all ready except I just need to debug the code for the last
two Web pages.
So this second computer will also have appropriate
copies from the Microsoft BizSpark program
of Windows Server, IIS, and SQL Server for production for
my startup.
Comments
Have you considered a hardware upgrade and switching to a virtual OS workflow? It sounds like it might be worth your time to consider.
I have a 4 year old AMD cpu (not sure which one), 16 GB RAM (cost about $80) and SSD (best upgrade in years)
my bare metal OS is win8, on which I have minimal software installed. I use multiple VMware images for software I don't use often or which installs too much cruft which I don't like slowing down my machine.
For example, I only need VS occasionally. For some reason even a minimal install of VS comes along with 10s of MS service packs SQL server IIS etc. Basically junk that I don't need. So now it lives in a VM that I might fire up once in a while.
Benefits of a VM:
On a mid range system VMware works flawlessly and gives seamless access to host resources such as networking and USB etc.Running a XP VM would offer multiple benefits such as access to your old software and VM sandboxing for security issues that go along with running an EOLd OS
I understand virtual machines from my old IBM days, but so far I have yet to do anything with them on PCs. Likely for my startup, as the work moves along (today made good progress on some de/serialization issues -- wrote some small test programs that showed that de/serialization was working like it should; now to find out why it was not working in the code of a Web page talking to one of my 'servers', now just software on the same computer but intended to be on a separate computer, TCP/IP communications in both cases).
The sand boxing security sounds good. Maybe in practice for years VMs are the only easy path we have to security from 'malware', etc.
I intend to buy a second computer fairly soon. I will install the copy of Windows 7 Professional I already have and then get used to the computer, arrange that each of my computers can copy backup files to the other one. And/or get a hard drive connected vis USB and some appropriate software, or maybe just use XCOPY or WinZip.
With two computers, if one of them is down for some reason, then I can still get to the Internet with the other one.
The second computer will also be the first server for my startup, to go live fairly soon -- the software is all ready except I just need to debug the code for the last two Web pages.
So this second computer will also have appropriate copies from the Microsoft BizSpark program of Windows Server, IIS, and SQL Server for production for my startup.