i live on a beach and the wet salty air is eating all my electronics, so decided to buy inexpensive laptop for a change, $200, acer one, 1.7ghz, 2gig ram. figured i could make it work fast, but windoze 10 such a hog i'm thinking of trying out linux with windows xp or perhaps something like windoze7 light, cut off from the internet in a virtual box. i only use three programs which need to connect to internet: google chrome, Total Commander for file management and FTP, and google drive. i'd like to keep these three if possible, to install on linux. otherwise i'm happy with Office 2003 and need windoze for some translation software which i believe only works with W. i ordered 2 more gigaram and was thinking of running operating system off of external ssd card. something like this possible? any suggestions would be appreciated. if the salty air eats this cheap computer, i can just get another one and supposedly plug in the external card.

I've ran winXp in VirtualBox and it is just a matter of selecting NAT in the network settings for your guest, in this case, Xp.

I doubt you'll be able to run Windows in virtualbox with that 2gb ram, I mean you might be able to run it but it will be unusablely slow.

like i wrote, i ordered two more gigs, so will have 4gigs of ram, and was also considering trying out this windoze 7 lite, for example. i once had a really old laptop, i think perhaps even 500mb ram, not sure, but got xp on there with a light shell and worked quite fine. a lot faster than this windows 10 and 2 gigs. sick of these bells and whistles. how much ram does linux require?

Linux, ram? anywhere from 30mb to all you got, depending on which distro you're running and what you're doing on it.

You can install Linux almost anywhere. a ssd should be very easy.

BTW Chrome runs on Linux, and you could likely find some alternatives for the rest.

I hope this works out for you. Keep us updated, I'm curious to see how Windows will run. Good Luck!

I run Win7 (licensed and activated, by the way) in a VirtualBox VM. It has no problem connecting to the internet. In an aside to Mill J, it runs just fine.

I set it to have a bridged adapter, but "bridged" or "NAT" ought to connect to the Big Wide World. "Host Only" will not.

30mb??? are you cereal? or surreal? there seems to be some workarounds for gdrive and seems i'll have to find a new file manager, but enough with these bells and whistles. i like the idea of a lean and mean machine running off a slim little ssd (which i can easily backup for a second). just curious, if it is set up for a particular laptop, would it work if i plugged the usb into any other computer? i guess i gotta go into bios and change the default boot drive or something?

Yes 30 mb, of course this is a very very minimal distro(Core Linux) and when you start adding software the ram also goes up, Most Linux Distros recommend a gig.

If you install the bootloader on the external drive you should be able to boot on a different pc, keep in mind 64bit OS doesn't work on 32bit system, And that an efi bootloader might not work on an older system.
Im running Puppy Linux on a usb stick, and I can boot on any x86_64bit system with legacy support.

All in all you will find Linux Very flexible.

sounds exciting and thanks for the great advice. most important is i do NOT want windoze to have access to the internet within its virtual box. if i go for xp or whatever, i don't want my internet hogged up with constant updates or some virus software hogging up my cpu because windoze is constantly under attack.

so which version of linux do you recommend? i have very little experience with it. looked at it once and seemed like a nightmare. i just need chrome, drive and some file manager with ftp capabilities running on it, then the virtual box for windows some version to run my translation software, office 2003 for minimum, then coreldraw and video editing for candy. the rest of the stuff is pretty light, like making webpages and so forth.

I would recommend that you start with something like Linux Mint, and go from there. If Mint isn't light(fast) enough, there are many more that are, reinstalling is no big deal, since Linux is free.

Distrowatch sometimes helps, this is the beginner section(scroll down) https://distrowatch.com/search-mobil...gory=Beginners

I think you're overestimating the danger. I've had Windows XP and 7 in virtual machines for over 10 years and have never used anti-virus or had a virus or malware. I've also never had a Windows VM do an "update".

that sounds intriguing, definitely tired of these constant updates and virus scans. concerning the Mint, was looking at Fedora. would that be too resource hogging? i'll be upgrading to 4gig ram and run it off an external ssd card, so maybe my resources wont be SO limited. if i switch to another distro i guess the windoze vm will continue to work?
also, one problem i'm having is i cannot install my win7 over top of the win10 that came with the computer. its complaining about some gpt disk partition or something. i couldn't even install win7 on another partition drive on the same hdd. until i get my external ssd, possible somehow to install linux on a partition drive on the computer? when i tried to install win7 on it, once it was time to reboot to complete the installation it showed an error, regarding the gpt. read some articles on it and looked like an absolutely horror show to get around it. easiest solution apparently is to delete the first two partitions (they seem to be invented for the gpt thing, perhaps devised by MS to make it difficult to roll back), then merge them into the third drive C, or perhaps just reformat them. but then i fear i'll screw up my operating system. if i try to install win7 in a virtual box, how will the installation find it on reboot during installation? definitely a challenge this all!

Only one way to find out if a distro is a resource hog, run it. You can create a live usb and live boot to test without modifying your current harddrive.

Yes you certainly can install Linux on a partition, you might be interested in dual booting, you can install Linux along side of Windows no problem, where you can boot to Windows or Linux.

Virtualbox is an app that acts like a computer, so a reboot in virtualbox will not shutdown the host system.

before i mark this as Solved i'll make a few notes. working great. i installed windows xp sp3, as i read that is the best. turn off automatic updates, no need for antivirus software, keep on firewall why not, and the only thing i use in windoz for internet is the Total Commander file manager with its ftp function. this connects to my server with secure password, so there is no need for security concerns. chrome works fine in linux. set up a regular user account in linux and use that for added security. also, if something goes wrong, you can always log into the admin account and fix things. so overall a very secure system. but it's true that an upgrade to 4 gigsram is advisable if wanna run xp in a vm. i have it running off an ssd card and it works lightning fast like a charm, like my previous macair, but 1/7th the cost

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