[kwlug-disc] upgrading hardware/64bit OS

[unsolicited]

You should be able to upgrade to 4GB RAM without any software changes, 
and see a difference, if there is a difference to be seen. i.e. If 
it's, or the machine, is memory starved, this should get you over a 
hump. One vm with 4GB RAM hard, 2GB for VM, should be more than 
sufficient no matter how much memory you have. i.e. If not running 
multiple more vm's, 4GB would be sufficient - 32/64 bit won't be an 
issue, and more RAM isn't going to help.

Since it's a vm, you could try it on different machines you have, and 
see to what extent you see a performance gain. e.g. More RAM on one 
machine vs. a faster CPU on another.

FWIW, on a Windows machine, virtualbox was so slow I went back to 
vmware player. YMMV. You could try this vm under windows and just peek 
if there are any noticeable performance changes.

Any 64 bit OS can vm a 32 bit OS, but the reverse is not true. You 
could also run the vm against physical disk partitions. (Not 
recommended for Windows - it gets very unhappy at the hardware 
changes. But if you only ever boot it that way / the vm hardware 
doesn't change, you'd be OK.) [hw change as in dual boot AND vm boot.]

So, you could copy the vm to a usb key, go to different machines, and 
see if you can spot a difference. For that matter, I suspect with a 
live cd and this vm on a usb key, you could walk around trying 
hardware / speed.

Do you have any sense as to the cause of the slowness? Is it lack of 
memory, are you CPU bound, is the video slow?

Insurance Squared Inc. wrote, On 08/30/2010 10:43 AM:
> My wife is running Mandriva(32bit) on her business computer with a 
> couple of gigs of ram.  Everything runs fine except her windows 
> bookkeeping app.  I've got virtualbox installed to run windows and it's 
> just slow -  slow enough that she mentions it.
> 
> My thinking is that she needs more RAM.  To get more RAM, she really 
> needs a 64 bit OS.  For a 64 bit OS, I need a machine that has a 
> processor that will work with that (is that correct?  I've tried to 
> install mandriva 64bit before on other machines and it objected because 
> the hardware wasn't 64 bit).
> 
> Am I on the right track here?  Upgrade her hardware to a new processor 
> with lots of RAM, then upgrade the OS to take advantage of the RAM, then 
> virtualbox will run faster?  If so, what kind of hardware should I be 
> looking at, processor-wise and how much ram would you get?