Advice ! --- Windows 10 and LL Dual-boot or VM

[Colin23erk]

Hi all
I have bought a HP Splash netbook with Win10 pre-installed. It has only a 32Gb which I will only use for my OSs with a 32 Gb fast Sd card for my Data . How things have changed . On win95 the PC only had something like a 6.5 Gb hard drive .


LL is my preferred OS but  I find there are certain times that I find I have to use Windows for some tasks . On my old machines I have LL dual booted with Win 7 . Plus LL with XP .


I would be happy to use XP  offline as my other OS as I have used that more than Win7 .Unfortunately the Windows licences are all OEM versions and so I cannot transfer them to a different PC .


I am looking to hear if anyone has had a good experience running LL with Win 10 on a Virtual Machine  or would the advise me to  Dual Boot with Win 10 on a UEFI bios Netbook .


Colin

[technomancer]

Colin, I have not had to use a Win 10 PC as of yet. I won't use it due to multiple issues with privacy. Wipe and install Linux is what I usually do.

To continue to inquire, a couple questions,
1) Is 32Gb the only storage you have as a HDD ? If so Windoze will most likely need all that space since it has a different and messy filesystem type(ntfs). I used up a 60GB very quickly.
2) Are you able to upgrade the HDD to a larger disk ? If so there is a way to bit by bit copy the old HDD so you retain Windoze on a partition on a new HDD.

As far as Virtualbox and Windowz, I run Win7, and OSX at the same time on LinuxLite as the host OS. No issues at all, but I have a powerful laptop with i7,16gb ram, 2 1TB hybrid HDD's, and Nvidia graphics.
I gave up on the small netbooks due to speed and lack of versatility issues. Portability is great for 1 OS on them, but you sacrifice power.

Retaining Win10 and Dual booting Linux I recommend upgrading the HDD size, whatever type it be.
OR you could Use Unetbootin and a micro USB drive, Install LinuxLite with persistance on the USB and then avoid the above suggestions. That way you could have the best of both worlds, but UEFI may present an issue with booting. Not sure if you can boot Win10 after turning it off like you can in Win7.

Maybe try and use a USB drive and install Linux to that, boot loader as well on the USB drive. Then you would have to enter boot menu of BIOS to choose what OS you want to boot every time.

[Colin23erk]

Thanks
Unfortunately a downside of the low-end Net/Lap Books is to cut costs they do not have conventional HDD or SSD  they use a version of SD disk technology thats  soldered directly to the motherboard  . As these PCs are intended for Web use (ie ChromeBook) they only need  32Gb and 64Gb sizes to run the OS and a small amount of Data .

They can be repaired or upgraded but need a special heat gun to melt the solder on the underneath of the chip ( see You Tube ) I worked in Telecomms using soldering irons and know just how hot they need to be to melt solder .

My present idea is to uninstall Win10  and Install  LL 64 bit  and then use a VM ( not sure which yet ) to run Win XP. I am not sure of the need to Activate it on VM thats a problem as my CD is  an OEM one.

It looks from my research that Microsoft in spite of no longer supporting XP still wants it activating for new installs .Looking on the Web it looks as if there are some ( dodgy / illegal ) ways of getting round that . I might try some as I feel that I have already paid enough blood money to Microsoft on OEM software that was lost when the PCs died ( MS don't do refunds )

colin