A few Windows 7 Questions

[HaX]

Due to a change in personal circumstances, I'm going to be living in temporary accommodation for part of the week. This means that I'l be away from my PC, which is a quad core beasty with 8 GB RAM.

I've got my eye on a rather nice laptop which ships with Win 7, but before I hand over my cash, I have a few questions I need answering.

Firstly - Will I be able to use Bluetooth headphones under Windows 7 and will the laptop speakers be muted while I use the Bluetooth headphones?

Secondly, I'm about to begin upgrading my Microsoft Certs to Windows Server 2008. In order to learn the feature sets of the new OS, I really need to have a virtual environment set up. Looking at having 2 Win 2008 Servers and a Vista/Win 7 client. Would a laptop with 4 GB RAM and Win 7 x64 be able to handle this?

Cheers

HaX

 

[Mattus]

Firstly - Will I be able to use Bluetooth headphones under Windows 7 and will the laptop speakers be muted while I use the Bluetooth headphones?

That will most likely depend on the drivers for the headphones and the laptop sound card. There's no reason why Windows 7 wouldn't allow it, though.

Looking at having 2 Win 2008 Servers and a Vista/Win 7 client. Would a laptop with 4 GB RAM and Win 7 x64 be able to handle this?

It should work as long as the CPU supports virtualisation. The processor finder on the Intel website should tell you whether a particular CPU supports it. Other than that, having a reasonably fast hard drive will help a lot - running three VMs from a slow 5400rpm drive might get quite laggy.

 

[SiriusB]

You also need to make sure the virtualization is enabled in the BIOS too. Quite often it is disabled. You may also need to completely power off the laptop and remove the battery, and then reboot to the BIOS.

Using Virtualbox I can run Server 2008 R2 and two instances of Windows 7 all on 2GB of RAM. Almost completely killed my computer but it made it, just! 4GB you should be good, though as said 5400rpm HDD gonna slow things up a tad.

 

[theheyes]

In my subjective experience of running VMs on my laptop having a 5400 drive isn't that bad to be honest. Allocated RAM to the virtual machines is more important.

Server 2008 will run with 512mb RAM but is slow - and that's only really running one role so I would suggest 1GB at least.