Windows XP VM in Ubuntu for Photoshop/Lightroom

Soldato
Joined
1 Mar 2003
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Location
Cotham, Bristol
My laptop screen is just too small for editing photos and I don't have a main Windows desktop machine so I decided to create a VM on my Ubuntu machine using Virtual Box.

Seeing however as I have a library of several thousand pictures running back 8 years or more, what should the minimum spec be for the VM, currently I have assigned one core and 1GB RAM to the VM, of course this runs very slowly when trying to browse the library in lightroom.

I tried upping the RAM to 2GB but seeing as I only have 4GB on the computer it seems to throw a hissy fit.

What specs would people recommend? Also should I consider running all of this on a solid state HD? Or is it not worth it, my current 1.5TB Sata HD does seem to churn over a lot when I use it for this purpose.
 
you could buy another sata HD and then dual boot with windows, it should give the best performance instead of trying to use a VM with limited memory. Std drive should be fine for photo editing work, a solid state will be quicker but they don't like large quantities of writes ie they are great as a boot drive but probably not the best as a storage drive/scratch disk.
 
A VM just simply isn't what you want for this job (unless of course you had a dedicated VM host with a bucket load of RAM and processors) as suggested your best bet is a second hard disk and a dual boot.
 
Ok I'll explore the dual boot route, is 4GB enough for a large library of RAW files or should I consider upgrading?
 
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