I want a desktop PC with both Windows XP and Windows 8 (or 10) on it. Dual boot or virtualisation?

In My Humble Opinion
1

For nostalgic reasons, I would like to play late 1990s, early 2000s computer games on a PC which ran perfectly fine on Windows XP but are hard to get running on Windows 7 (haven’t tried on Win 8), even in the compatibility mode. Thus, I’d like to buy a PC and install Windows XP on it*. Since there is no Microsoft support for XP any more, I don’t feel comfortable using an XP machine to go online, so I’m going to install a more recent Windows version, probably 8 (but I might wait for 10 to be released), on the same machine.

My question now is: Would it be preferable to do this by means of dual boot, or as a virtualisation of XP from within Windows 7/10? I’ve never done either, but there are lots of websites with step-by-step guides on how to do that, so I guess I’d be able to get it running.

As far as arguments for one approach or the other are concerned, my considerations so far are:

Pro dual boot:
[ul]
[li]A clean, neat separation between the two OS, with neither of them interfering with the other[/li][li]I guess virtualisation puts more on a strain on the computing power of the system, so dual boot might be more stable and less resource consuming[/li][/ul]

Pro virtualisation:
[ul]
[li]No need to reboot if I want to switch between operating systems[/li][li]From what I read, dual boot requires the older Windows version to be installed first, so setting it up would be more of a hassle since XP has no on-board software for making the hard disk partition which a dual boot installation would require (presumably, the PC I’m going to buy will have Win 8/19 pre-installed anyway)[/li][li]I can more easily control that the virtualised XP doesn’t get access to the internet without me knowing it’s online, so it’s safer[/li][li]Both OS get access to the entire hardware resources of the machine; I don’t have to make up my mind how much hard disk space (and possibly also RAM?) to devote to which version of Windows[/li][/ul]

So far, I’m leaning towards virtualisation, but I have no experience how stable something like this actually is. Is a virtualisation of an OS within another prone to crashing? Is there a noticeable drop in performance?

*): To avoid misunderstandings: I’m going to do that legally. In particular, I’m going to buy a Win XP licence. I know these licences are not available from Microsoft any more, but there is case law from German courts according to which the restrictions of OEM software licences to the hardware with which they were shipped is unenforceable. It is thus perfectly legal in this jurisdiction for merchants to buy hardware with OEM software, unbundle the software, and re-sell hardware and operating system separately. I’m planning to buy such an unbundled OEM licence from a perfectly legit store.

2

I use VMs for a lot of different things, including working, and have for many years. I really like them - they are fairly stable, and it’s way easier to start up a virtual machine than it is to reboot. There’s no interference between the two OSs, and I wouldn’t worry about performance considering you’re buying a Win8/10 machine - it’s going to be very powerful in comparison to what the average XP machine was back in the day.

For me it’s a no-brainer; I’d definitely go VM over dual-boot for what you’re considering.

3

Virtualization, especially if XP needs to be internet-facing.

4

Emulated video cards are generally pretty weak…

5

I thought about that, too, but the flip side is that we’re talking XP games here. They’re not going to need a great video card.

Plus… the OP can try out a VM and then toss it if it doesn’t work for him and go the dual-boot route. The only cost is the price of XP, and he’s going to buy that regardless. Definitely worth a try.

6

Having it be a VM makes it a heck of a lot easier to transfer files between one side and the other. There are a lot of support scenarios, especially if you don’t ever want the XP machine to see the internet, where moving files between the OSes is useful.

A modern PC running XP in a VM will have faster performance than did a PC of the early XP era.

7

Another vote for virtualization. VirtualBox is free, and works pretty well–at work, I run it on an iMac with Win7 as the guest OS. I can run Visual Studio with decent performance.

8

Chalk up another vote for virtualisation. In addition to the points already mentioned by others, if you do go online with an XP VM and it were to be compromised, all you would need to do is revert to a backed up image, without generally having to worry that the compromise is going to cause your overall system any problems. At least one exploit is known to check if it’s running on a VM or not before trying to exploit your system (Angler/Teslacrypt supposedly won’t execute in a VM, according to this article on Tom’s Guide), and it wouldn’t surprise me if there aren’t others who do the same.

Virtualbox has been said to only have a couple of developers working on it now, though, so you might consider using VMWare Player instead, though I think both do emulated DirectX 9 with their add-on tools. Or you can go the semi-crazy route and buy hardware (CPU and Motherboard) supporting VT-d, install a Linux host, and use qemu/kvm or Xen to pass through a PCI-express graphics card so you get near-native performance, but the process for doing that isn’t well documented, so that might be painful or overkill** for what you want.

**He says posting from a Win 8.1 VM running with a Geforce GTX 970 passed through on a Linux Mint 17.1 host.

9

Missed the edit window, but I’ll add that the method I’m using (qemu-kvm) has been incredibly stable (given that it’s still viewed as experimental) as far as day to day operation goes for my Win 8.1 VM, with the only hitch occasionally popping up with reboots (but not full shutdowns) of the VM. Windows 10 Technical Preview, not so much, but that is still in beta itself. Past experience with VMWare, Parallels (when I owned a Mac), and Virtualbox all were fairly stable as well, though you do suffer from a performance hit in those environments, particularly if your processor doesn’t support VT-x (or AMD’s equivalent) or in 3D games.

10

Between Parallels and VMWare (long boring story omitted), I have Windows 3.11, Windows 95, Windows 2000 Server, Windows XP, Windows 2003 Server, Windows 2008 Server, and Windows 7 available as virtual machines. Also MacOS 10.5 Server, 10.6.8, 10.7.5, 10.8.5, 10.9.2, 10.9.5, and 10.10.2, and BSD Unix just for the heck of it. (Host box is a Mac running 10.6.8)

I rarely encounter any reason for regretting not being able to boot from “the iron on up” into the other operating systems. I won’t say there are never gitches but dual (or octuple or whatever) boot systems can have their share of glitches too.

11

Thanks everybody for the input. Looks like there are a lot of benefits and few, or even negligible, downsides to virtualisation, so I’ll give that a try. Thanks again!