VM for daily use

dhay13

anyone here use a VM as their daily PC? i have a Dell precision M4500 that i bought new in 2010. it has a quad-core i5 with 8GB Ram. knowing it is fairly old i thought of setting up a VM and using that as my daily PC. so last night i set up a Win7 test VM in my ESXi box with 12GB Ram and 4 cores. my thoughts were it would be easier to recover from a hardware (or software) failure if i were using the VM (provided i have a daily backup and snapshots). i have so much stuff loaded on my laptop that setting a new one up wold take weeks. i have a CNC machine in my garage and have the CAD software installed on here (several different programs), i am also an active trader in the stock market and have a few platforms running simultaneously during the day, and all of my practice/testing software. i dread the thoughts of this thing crashing and having to reinstall all of that. just thought a VM would make this process a whole lot easier. i would just RDP into my virtual desktop at that point. speed is another consideration. since my trading is often an in and out in 5 or 10 minutes speed is pretty important. will i see a significant speed reduction using RDP? based on my experience i would say no but have never tested that theory

techfiend

Not a bad idea to use a VM for daily use if you don't need the hardware acceleration. Snapshots are definitely nicer than backing up a whole OS every time you make a change. I use VM's to test new programs or configurations before implementing into the host OS. I require hardware acceleration for some of the things I do, videos and games, but other than that living in a VM isn't bad.

I spend 95% of my time at work in VM's. I even use a Windows 8.1 VM instead of the very buggy Windows 10 host on my laptop. I know some will say that's a downgrade but as long as classicshell is installed I think 8.1 is microsoft's best OS so far. Windows 10 will eventually catch up or the hackers will eventually workaround all the bugs, forced automation and security issues.