Virtual machine thje way to go?

[moonbogg]

OK, so my wife's laptop died and she wants to do photo editing but has no computer. I just built a 3930k rig for gaming (overkill I know) and was wondering if I could set up a virtual machine and run a seperate monitor for her without killing my gaming performance.
Is there a way to provide 2 of the cores for her to use while I use the remaining 4 for gaming? Will this use too much Vram? I got 2gb cards and game at 1080p. BF3 is my game and it uses 1.5gb. I got 16gb of ram so theres plenty for both of us. How would I do this and is this a reasonable idea?

 

[cl-scott]

While a noble gesture, it will not likely go to well. Consider for a moment that only one Window can have focus at a time, and how do you plan to contend with a second keyboard and mouse? Windows is just not designed for more than one user at a time, having been designed in the 1980s when computers were islands unto themselves, and while there are (expensive) solutions to solve this particular problem, most of them leave much to be desired.

You can probably find a reasonably priced unit for your wife without too much difficulty. You may even have some spare parts sitting around that you could quickly cobble together into a working computer with only a few additions.

 

[BrightCandle]

If your wife had a low end PC the she could use a VM on your machine with remote desktop. But its unlikely o be much better than just a low end PC doing the work locally except in a few cases.

 

[moonbogg]

Thanks for replies. In my ignorance, I was hoping for it to work perfectly and simply. I thought, "two computers in one, yay". Guess its not that simple.

 

[Nothinman]

MS makes it very difficult to do what you want. The simplest would be to setup a VM for her and let her RDP into that, but that requires she has something to RDP from and you would need another Windows license for the VM anyway.

 

[Ken g6]

What you want is called a "multiseat configuration". It's easy to do in Linux. But in searching, I've found only one software that might do what you want on Windows 7. It's called BeTwin. "Only" $100 per extra seat! And you might need an extra video card, plus the monitor/keyboard/mouse.

Edit: I was relying on old information. Here's some software that only costs $50.

 

[VirtualLarry]

What you want is called a "multiseat configuration". It's easy to do in Linux. But in searching, I've found only one software that might do what you want on Windows 7. It's called BeTwin. "Only" $100 per extra seat! And you might need an extra video card, plus the monitor/keyboard/mouse.

Edit: I was relying on old information. Here's some software that only costs $50.

Interesting info, thanks.

 

[Spungo]

If your wife had a low end PC the she could use a VM on your machine with remote desktop. But its unlikely o be much better than just a low end PC doing the work locally except in a few cases.

The problem is VM has no advantage when dealing with video and sound. Playing youtube video through Remote Desktop doesn't work very well. The only things that would be faster through VM are things like video encoding or creating zip files.

 

[davidthemaster3]

I've seen youtube videos of the SofXpand solution and that seems to work great. Mutliseat with 2 x BF3 or Wow and D3!

Unfortunately, I can't get it to work on my computer and I still haven't found the reason why yet :/

 

[lazarost]

I'm using Softxpand Duo for the last couple of months, while it is not perfect, it will accomplish what the OP asks.

I'm using it on an i5-2500k/z68 mobo/16 gigs of ram/gtx560 and the onboard hd3000, and while you can not attach cores/processes to users, suffers little to no performance penantly.

The reason I'm using both gfx cards is that I have dual monitors for me, so that left the hd3000 for more outputs for the second user. My second user just browses the web and plays youtube videos, so luckily I did not have to go out to buy one more card, which I would have to if the second user was a gamer as well.
If you have only one monitor for each of you, you can only use one gfx card.

One of the bugs that I found is that if you use 2 video cards and have aero on for both users (if you just use one card,aero is disabled for both users), while playing flash/video dwm.exe spikes in cpu utilisation making everything laggy and you have to do "cmd -> net stop uxsms" to make it to stop.

Other bugs include the occasional game which "can not start in an RDP session" (you have to log out and back in) and some strange incompatibility with my logitech g15 companion software (which couldn't solve, and had to go back to the previous version).

Also it is incompatible with Windows 8 RP at the moment.

All in all, it is a great piece of software whilst not perfect it does the job quite well.

I just wish I could pay Microsoft for 2 licences, flip a switch in computer management and have the same capability.

Edit: I guess you can do the same thing with a VM and an RDP using a client such as a raspberry pi or any other thin client. The cost is pretty low; 35€ for the rpi and 60-100€ for the other clients.