Digital Light & Color

With the ending of Microsoft support for XP Im looking at my options for upgrading my trusty xp box which I do all my Picture Windows Pro photo processing on. Of course I could buy a new Win7 licence and Ive read the post about installing WINE on a linux box (Ive got a couple of Linux boxes which frankly I find way better than windows).

However, Ive also played around with Virtualbox (but providing a Linux virtual machine on a windows xp host) which I found pretty good but then I wasnt really doing anything near as computationally intensive as image processing. Seeing as I have the xp licence I can then have a zero cost OS, debian linux, and run Picture Windows in the VirtualBox emulator also for zero cost.

Anyone tried this approach and any feedback or benefit of your experience would be gratefully read.

Cheers!

ps jonathan kirel et al great job with a great product and youll not get any whinges from me saying you should provide a linux based product!

Since no one else has replied: My experience is 3 years old, but at that time PWP ran okay in VBox on either Xubuntu or OSX. However, the VBox graphics system didn't seem to support color lookup tables for color management. There was some slowdown relative to running on the bare metal, but not too noticeable.

If you are buying a new computer, I don't see advantages to doing this over just running Win 7 or Win 8. At least in the US, Linux boxes don't appear to be cheaper than comparable Windows machines, and PWP runs very nicely on my Win 7 Core i5 machine.

If you can afford it, I would recommend getting one of the newer quad-core machines (Core i5 or Core i7) as PWP 7 takes advantage of this to compute image data in parallel. Windows 7 or even Windows 8 if you get Start8 or something similar that makes it look like Windows 7 are both reasonable options.