If you're planning on running any virtual machines in production, instead of just learning & development, you should probably do it on a dedicated system.
Your current system can handle a bunch of VMs without a problem, but you'll commit a good chunk of your RAM. So if you have 3x VMs with 512MB of RAM each, your host OS will "lose" access to 1.5GB of RAM. That's 1.5GB of RAM that any games won't have access to.
I normally shut down any virtual machines before loading any games, but those are development VMs and not "production" systems. Other than games, you should be able to do everything else you normally do. Even ripping / converting movies - those tend to be I/O- and CPU-intensive, so as long as your virtual machines aren't heavily utilized you should be okay.
Anyways, best thing to do is just download and get started. Best way to learn through experience anyways
![]()
Your current system can handle a bunch of VMs without a problem, but you'll commit a good chunk of your RAM. So if you have 3x VMs with 512MB of RAM each, your host OS will "lose" access to 1.5GB of RAM. That's 1.5GB of RAM that any games won't have access to.
I normally shut down any virtual machines before loading any games, but those are development VMs and not "production" systems. Other than games, you should be able to do everything else you normally do. Even ripping / converting movies - those tend to be I/O- and CPU-intensive, so as long as your virtual machines aren't heavily utilized you should be okay.
Anyways, best thing to do is just download and get started. Best way to learn through experience anyways
