Honestly I had to google what Windows Explorer was

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What advantages would running WinXP in a virtual machine have over dual booting please? If I was dual booting then I would probably be using WinXP most of the time.

Tedious details you can skip:

My hard-disk with WinXP died, probably for mechanical reasons or much less likely some infection that I could not detect. I bought a new hard-drive but as WinXP is no longer supported by anti-virus software I got a copy of Win7 with licence, but I found that Win7 did not have a driver for the audio on the computer, nor for the old printer I prefer to use.

So out of frustration I moved the hard-drive to another computer someone had given me (minus its HDD) which I thought was a newer model than the computer I had been using, although I've recently discovered that they are the same age and both 64bit and that the "old" computer allows more memory. Linux ran out-of-the-box without any problems. It is also said to be much more secure, and it would be nice to be released from the treadmill of having to perpetually buy another even more gimmicky Win OS and thus also having to buy a higher spec computer to run it on. I've been using Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon for a while. If there was anti-virus software for WinXP I would be content to use it until it was no longer supported by Firefox etc.

I could afford to buy a brand new Windows computer with Win10, but it seems a waste to throw away other very good computers that are just a few years old. It would be nice to get out of the Windows rat-race.

You would, for all practical purposes, be running winXp as a application on your Linux desktop and you wouldn't need to dual boot, that is, boot back and forth between the two operating systems.
Besides using the scanning software in winXP in VirtualBox, I sometimes will install the windows version of a application and compare the differences between it and the Linux version. Recently I've been doing that with Vivaldi. Usually, I configure Xp in VirtualBox to be an "Internal Network" so it isn't exposed to the outside world, but when comparing something like a browser, that can be easily changed.
My hard disk is setup to dual boot winXp and Slackware64, but I rarely boot to winXp. As I like to tinker (experiment) with the computer it has come in handy with I "blow up" my Linux setup.


While mickeysoft no longer provides security upgrades for XP, most anti-virus companies still make software for Xp-service pack 3.


All good reasons and many the very same reasons people have been dumping ms-windows for years. With every new release of ms-windows, but especially with win10, people start looking at alternatives, be it Linux, the Mac or one of the BSDs.

As someone said in response to you in another thread, "enjoy the difference" between ms-windows and Linux. They are not the same. Don't expect everything to work out of the box "just like ms-windows," but you will find just about everything you need. Once you get use to Linux you'll realize it is a superior operating system and the applications every bit as good, if not better, than the software you have been buying for ms-windows.
Some Linux distributions will "hold your hand," and some will require a little "sweat equity." It is well worth the effort!

...

I've never been a Windows guy if he'd said Finder I'd have known.

Main advantage is that you won't need to close everything down to work on one, and then close everything down again to work on the other. With a VM you can have both working at the same time.

E.g. I can have all my office suite programs running in Linux, my email, my web browser, graphics editors, programming environments, etc. etc. etc. The only reason I use Windows for personal stuff is due to some banking / accounting / taxation programs which only work on Windows (some only on XP) / web sites which only work with IE (some even just with IE6). So I have an XP inside a VM with only the needed stuff. That way I can still have my document open in Libreoffice (from which I want to refer info), while opening the XP program and copy-paste between each other. Try doing that with a dual boot! If you setup the VM correctly you even get an XP program running in XP while appearing as if it's actually running in the booted up Linx (you feel as if there's no extra OS running) - called Seamless Mode in VirtualBox, Unity in VMWare: http://www.howtogeek.com/171145/use-...rtual-machine/

As for most of my work, I need to be running Win7 or higher (which BTW then does not work with above mentioned progs/web sites) on bare metal. Since most of my work is in 3d modelling in Revit, which is Windows only. I've tried it through a VM, and have found that a Virtualbox VM is simply stupidly slow for graphics intensive stuff, VMWare Player is closer to decent but still not as fast as a dual boot. So for such ideas I generally go with the dual boot, then have the same Linux I usually boot running as a VM inside that Windows. But I seldom do this type of work at home, so I generally boot into Linux instead of Windows.

Another reason (not pertinent to all) is during programming I sometimes need to test a web page / server / program on another OS. I don't want to spend extra time to reboot into another each time I'm debugging something. So I run my program inside another Linux / BSD / Windows / whatever in a VM, while my programming environment is in the host Linux. I.e. I use remote debugging as if the VMs are extra computers connected to a network. Saves a lot of time and hassle, while not requiring me to have a free computer for every single OS I need to test - i.e. a lot cheaper.

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Are there still websites that only work with IE6? That is amazing.
(Not an attack of you just amazed that someone could run a website like that still).

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As an example, here I'm posting from Firefox inside an Ubuntu 14.04 64bit running inside a VMWare player on the Win8 I posted from previously. Note the icon below my name on the left.

Yes ... stupid aint it? Mostly government stuff ... but sometimes I still need it. Most recently one from which I get the building site registered perimeters (i.e. site diagrams). That thing still doesn't work on anything but IE6.

Anyhow, this I'm posting from another VM on the same machine running PearLinux. I.e. I've got 3 different OS's open at the same time on the same computer. Again - note the icon on the left.

And then just to show - here's a screen capture of Chome in W8, and the two FFs in Ubuntu and Pear. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-D...40/3%2BOSs.jpg

My PC (Dell T3400) runs disc 1 : dualboot Elementary OS and Fedora. On a separate disc, I have Win 10 pro in use for 3D CAD (Solidworks) and GPS Garmin up-dates.
Does anyone know how to maintain a GPS on Linux?
My Laptop runs dualboot Win 10 fam. and Fedora for the same reason as above.
I tried to run Solidworks in Win virtualbox but it didn't work.
For all daily purposes I use Fedora which I feel is more professional than EOS.
On my son's laptop (ASUS running Vista before) I installed EOS and he is very happy with it.
That's the way to create another Linux-user generation ;-)

I used to have to work with the darn thing for a living.

The late, great Kerio Personal Firewall.

There is nothing for Linux that comes anywhere close
to being as efficient and easy to use.

i think it is time to close this ...

What ones would these be please, as I have not been able to find any? Thanks

Webripper - you could type "Art Deco" or any other phrase of your choice, and get hundreds of photos of Art Deco downloaded to your computer. Of course it worked via Google. I think it had stopped working shortly before I started using Linux, apparently as Google would no longer accept requests from the old browsers it purported to be. The successor software by the same company never worked for me and was in any case not as simple to use.