A decade or so back, I finally got a machine powerful enough to usefully run a VM or 2 without killing foreground performance.
I figured I wanted the lightest-weight version of Windows that would do what I needed, so I tried a bunch: Win95B, Win98SE, NT 3.51, NT 4, Win2K, XP.
9x was eliminated straight away: it could only do 640*480 and didn't have good enough networking to get anything in or out.
NT 3/4 were about as limited but could do better networking.
W2K worked well but couldn't run the VirtualBox guest additions.
So I ended up with TinyXP, which ran in 40MB off the ISO image (although more like 220MB once fully-updated).
There's no point for me having my word-processor in a sealed box. I need to get files in and out. I want to be able to put stuff in Dropbox. I want to be able to get it in and out of LibreOffice and Gmail. I want to start in a Linux text editor, add some info in LibreOffice, save as .DOC and open it in Word to work on the structure. I want to be able to copy the name of the speaker, the talk, the time and subject and paste them direct from my browser into my notes.
It's host integration that means this isn't a toy for the sake of the thing. If I wanted that, I could run Wordsworth under UAE, or Word 5.1 under System 7 in Basilisk.
This is a tool to get work done. For that, I want the host environment to be as invisible as possible.
If you don't, well, fine. But your choices would be useless for me.
A decade or so back, I finally got a machine powerful enough to usefully run a VM or 2 without killing foreground performance.
I figured I wanted the lightest-weight version of Windows that would do what I needed, so I tried a bunch: Win95B, Win98SE, NT 3.51, NT 4, Win2K, XP.
9x was eliminated straight away: it could only do 640*480 and didn't have good enough networking to get anything in or out.
NT 3/4 were about as limited but could do better networking.
W2K worked well but couldn't run the VirtualBox guest additions.
So I ended up with TinyXP, which ran in 40MB off the ISO image (although more like 220MB once fully-updated).
There's no point for me having my word-processor in a sealed box. I need to get files in and out. I want to be able to put stuff in Dropbox. I want to be able to get it in and out of LibreOffice and Gmail. I want to start in a Linux text editor, add some info in LibreOffice, save as .DOC and open it in Word to work on the structure. I want to be able to copy the name of the speaker, the talk, the time and subject and paste them direct from my browser into my notes.
It's host integration that means this isn't a toy for the sake of the thing. If I wanted that, I could run Wordsworth under UAE, or Word 5.1 under System 7 in Basilisk.
This is a tool to get work done. For that, I want the host environment to be as invisible as possible.
If you don't, well, fine. But your choices would be useless for me.