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Virtual Machine for my Mum

CDas
By CDas
in New Builds and Planning
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Can I run a VM on my laptop ? My laptop is on 24x7 and I have a monitor, mouse and keyboard to spare. Plus the audio card on my laptop has two 3.5 mm output ports. I want to replace my mum's lightning damaged desktop but I am short on funds. Is it possible for my mum to have a pc within the afore-mentioned parameters ? Plz help ...

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Running a VM on a laptop wouldn’t matter, it’s the specs that matter. I’d say just give her a separate user account on the laptop. It’d work better than a VM. 

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5 minutes ago, Jamiec1130 said:

Running a VM on a laptop wouldn’t matter, it’s the specs that matter. I’d say just give her a separate user account on the laptop. It’d work better than a VM. 

But a separate user account wouldn't allow both of us to use the laptop simultaneously as different users. This aspect is especially important to us as she consumes a lot of Youtube while I do a lot of office work. BTW specs-wise the laptop is way overpowered for office work ...

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You can run VM on your laptop, but she would still need to have some other PC, so she can RDP to your VM that you are hosting on your PC.

That's how VMs work.

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27 minutes ago, CDas said:

But a separate user account wouldn't allow both of us to use the laptop simultaneously as different users. This aspect is especially important to us as she consumes a lot of Youtube while I do a lot of office work. BTW specs-wise the laptop is way overpowered for office work ...

But VM's are not office work. You're delegating half of your laptop to the VM and the rest of it to your current OS. You're better off giving her a separate account on your laptop instead of going VM unless you were using a really light version of Linux or something. 

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23 minutes ago, CDas said:

But a separate user account wouldn't allow both of us to use the laptop simultaneously as different users. This aspect is especially important to us as she consumes a lot of Youtube while I do a lot of office work. BTW specs-wise the laptop is way overpowered for office work ...

The two specs needed for reasonable VM work is number of cores/threads and amount of memory. A VM is going to take up a minimum of 2GB of dedicated memory when it is running and at under about 6GB it will be slow. So if you have a laptop with 16GB of memory you will probably be able to run one VM and still get work done on the machine.

 

The big trick is the most VM software is designed to be accessed either from the console or by a remote connection from another computer, so you need another computer to remote into the VM across the network to access the resources dedicated to the VM. I don't actually know of any off the top of my head that allow a second keyboard/mouse to be attached and dedicated to the VM - but I have generally worked with these in the server or "build a dedicated virtual test system" environments so there may be other tools that I am unaware of.

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7 minutes ago, AncientNerd said:

The two specs needed for reasonable VM work is number of cores/threads and amount of memory. A VM is going to take up a minimum of 2GB of dedicated memory when it is running and at under about 6GB it will be slow. So if you have a laptop with 16GB of memory you will probably be able to run one VM and still get work done on the machine.

 

The big trick is the most VM software is designed to be accessed either from the console or by a remote connection from another computer, so you need another computer to remote into the VM across the network to access the resources dedicated to the VM. I don't actually know of any off the top of my head that allow a second keyboard/mouse to be attached and dedicated to the VM - but I have generally worked with these in the server or "build a dedicated virtual test system" environments so there may be other tools that I am unaware of.

Found this info, is it any good ... 

https://superuser.com/questions/144968/dedicated-mouse-and-keyboard-on-virtualbox-vm

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11 minutes ago, Hiitchy said:

But VM's are not office work. You're delegating half of your laptop to the VM and the rest of it to your current OS. You're better off giving her a separate account on your laptop instead of going VM unless you were using a really light version of Linux or something. 

Like I said earlier, my laptop is way overpowered for office work. I am talking 16 gigs RAM, 4th gen i7 3.6Ghz, 8 Gb Nvidia 880M, etc. So I think running atleast 1 VM should be possible. 

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1 minute ago, CDas said:

Found this info, is it any good ... 

https://superuser.com/questions/144968/dedicated-mouse-and-keyboard-on-virtualbox-vm

Yea, that might work.  It looks like from what the responses say you would need to add a second mouse and keyboard to your laptop, tell windows not to use them, then in the VM configuration - before starting the VM - tell the VM to use the second mouse/keyboard only. I also suspect you are going to have to dedicate the second monitor to the VM, I know in the VM software I have used there was a setting to let me pick windowed or full screen, and if full screen which screen to take over if it was a multi-monitor setup.

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1 minute ago, CDas said:

Like I said earlier, my laptop is way overpowered for office work. I am talking 16 gigs RAM, 4th gen i7 3.6Ghz, 8 Gb Nvidia 880M, etc. So I think running atleast 1 VM should be possible. 

Yup I had a similar laptop a couple of years ago and was able to run up to two VMs at a time when doing light file editing in the foreground, one with a software development environment and one with a specific software test environment - both configured with 6GB of memory. 

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Just now, AncientNerd said:

Yea, that might work.  It looks like from what the responses say you would need to add a second mouse and keyboard to your laptop, tell windows not to use them, then in the VM configuration - before starting the VM - tell the VM to use the second mouse/keyboard only. I also suspect you are going to have to dedicate the second monitor to the VM, I know in the VM software I have used there was a setting to let me pick windowed or full screen, and if full screen which screen to take over if it was a multi-monitor setup.

You summarised my requirements perfectly. Now the question is how to do it ?

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4 minutes ago, CDas said:

You summarised my requirements perfectly. Now the question is how to do it ?

Unfortunately I haven't actually done this, so all I can say is grab a cheap keyboard/mouse and try it out with a windowed VM before you attach the external monitor.  

 

Basically if you can get your second KB/Mouse to be recognized in the VM and not in windows and your main KB/Mouse to not impact the VM then you are golden. It will be a matter of trying settings and doing google searches :D.

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