Just an opinion - but it's hard to beat VMWare Player for virtualizing Windows. VMWare Player is free (in cost) as is the OS tools. For Windows installations, it is automatic. Give VMWare Player the user name, and CD Key, everything else is done automaticially. Drives partitioned, user account created, OS tools installed, virtual machine rebooted. USB support is plug and play, no need to modify /etc/fstab or fdi files, or user permissions like with Virtual Box. We test a few NLite isos, Bart/WinPE setups, and disaster recovery sets - VMWare Player makes this quick and simple - no need to watch an installation screen prompting you for questions. Video acceleration in Windows is quite good as well. My girlfriend can at lest play Bejeweled Delux in full screen

For Linux Distros I use KVM. KVM performs better on Linux hosts with Linux guests compared to VMWare. It's the oppisite with Windows. I experience slower drive access in Windows guests hosted by KVM compared to VMWare - even with the virtio drivers in use.

Gave up on Virtual Box some time ago. Perhaps it's better now? I do recall performance being a serious bottleneck with VBox compared to KVM and VMWare. It's VRDP server being buggy, random VM crashes. All from the OSE, non-OSE and compiled from source releases. Support will have you disable ACPI, then SMP, then disable Video acceleration, then disable VT-x/AMD-V - why not just run KQemeu. That's something I can say about KVM and VMWare, I've never had a VM crash, nor lock up with either of these systems.

Do you, guys, get responsive graphics with windows in KVM with qemu, as interacting with menus and apps was slower in qemu than in virtualbox when i last checked qemu few years ago?

Which Guest OS/Driver?

You can use std, cirrus, vmware, xenfb, none. In Windows I've had to use 16bit color depth for the best response, not much difference between std and cirrus. The cirrus driver works fine for me in Linux.
Place this in your /etc/xorg.conf on the guest system to get a display larger than 800x600. The emulated cirrus graphics card does not support edid scanning, so Xorg falls back on a safe 800x600 resolution.
You can use vnc, which it what I normally do.

I also used VirtualBox to run Windows XP on my laptop. I get it from SlackBuilds.org, works well but I didn't use Windows too often at home since I'm busy with Slackware stuff. I use it for testing multiple IE versions for web development. So far, it works fine.

I'm a long time VBox user and I"ve sen it mature into a very good product. The only issue I have in 3.1.x is that my seamless mode doesn't work properly ... Apart from that, it's CLI ability is one of it's best features.

On the time being, which would you prefer to run windows xp under slack 13 64 bit?

I use Slack64 to run Vbox because I have a lot of ram and it enables me to give xp 3 gigs.
A stock 32 bit system will only recognize a total of 3 gigs and therefore much less to be assigned to the guest.

1 members found this post helpful.

I've never had any problems with with virtualbox or kvm/qemu. I run vbox on my 64-current desktop and kvm/qemu on my server which is running slack64. I like kvm/qemu for all my headless VM's.

1 members found this post helpful.

I run VirtualBox on PIII 800Mhz SMP works very well and XP is useable on slackware with opengl accelration and experimental DirectX support.

1 members found this post helpful.

Qemu-kvm literally crushes any actual virtualization program on any platform, except for usb and 3d stuff.