Sure, if you put the Windows in the VM.
I have run qemu successfully on a mobile Kaby Lake processor. Was a 8th gen i5 with 4c/8t, though, and the system had 32 gigs of Memory.
With that setup, I ran Windows to use Lightroom, went pretty smoothly.
So, like, the architecture can do it, but with 2c/4t and almost no Memory, you probably can’t do much on the host OS while running the emulator, and whatever you emulate probably also can’t be very heavy.
Please consider cleaning that screen.
Right :)))
Your GPU has 128 MB of memory? What for? Mine just pushes framebuffer contents outta the VGA and DVI-D ports, with some features like I²C to determine supported resolutions and VSYNC to prevent tearing.
iGPUs show like that
iGPUs vary by feature set a lot. A fully-featured GPU can sit on the motherboard and use the same cooling system as the CPU but most are bare-bones, maybe just with video codecs.
That doesn’t change the fact almost all iGPUs show in the system as having comically low VRAM. Also, for OPs use case GPU is not important at all.
Depending on what you want to do, yes this is fine for running VMs on. If you are just spinning up some containers or a lightweight VM to host something its fine.
i see a ram upgrade in your future. 4gb is barely enough for win10 to boot and run a browser or something. will need more on top of that for what you’re gonna be running with qemu. other than that, as long as you have virtualization enabled, the rest is ‘good enough’
Back in the early 2000s I acquired a copy of VMWare Workstation 5, I ran VMs on an HP dv6000 with a Turion CPU and a gig of RAM.
With XP it was fine, I even ran a Windows 2003 server VM with a domain controller on it.
Those days are two decades gone, you will need a minimum of 16GB on a normal computer, and I’d recommend 32GB to give yourself headroom for VMs these days.
It sucks, absolutely, but it is the current reality.
What do you want to do with the VM?
Damn, 1 GB of RAM in cca 2003? That was really a high-end machine. But 4 GB is enough for a Linux computer now with not too many browser tabs or workflows with large files.
I wish to run both linux as well as android on it.
I would recommend dual booting/switching to linux and running android via linux.
Memory is probably your biggest bottle neck here so setting up a bit of extra swap for Linux will be worthwhile until you can upgrade
That is what you will run on it, yes, what are you looking to do with it?
I’m new to computers actually, so yet to figure out what are the things that they can do. A VM can do.
VMs with desktop Linux or Android are technically possible but you won’t enjoy the performance. Better dual-boot with those specs.
Alright, just a heads up with the specs you posted, you may be rather disappointed with the performance of the VM.
Do you have any budget for computer hardware?
I’d start my learning journey with what l have in hand.
Right now, l’ve just installed a WSL. I’ve installed fish and zsh. I would have loved to install MX Linux, but l better stick with Ubuntu for the time being. My next step would be setting up vs code, and starting off my journey with git.
What are you planning to do with the vm?
If your intention is to run anything significant like multiple instances of windows or Linux then the answer is no. Ideally you’d have at least 8GB of ram if you just want one VM.
You’ll need to confirm if virtualization is enabled in the bios.
I would suggest replacing the os with something lighter like xubuntu. http://xubuntu.org/
I’d love MX Linux. I would like to run android as well.
install mx on the bare metal instead of a vm of it on win10, you’ll prolly even be able to run a win10 vm with better performance than native. also use zram.
What’s bare metal ?
Directly on the hardware, not virtualized in a VM.
I second that option. 4 GB of RAM is not enough for Windows 10. Install Linux, and if you need Windows-specific software use then with a VM; I used to do that and used Windows 7 instead of 10 as it is far lighter. This should improve the overall experience IMO.
Keep in mind that, in your current setup, any RAM you allocate to the VM will not be avaiable to Windows, so your 4 GB Windows (which is already low) will become, say, a 3 GB Windows when using a VM.
I understand what you say. This is my brother’s laptop, and he doesn’t have the patience to learn Linux. I believe this computer is not going to work on windows for long. When windows stop functioning on this laptop, l’d boot MX Linux straightaway. There should be no problem in creating a VM then I suppose ?
Most people just use the web browser anyways. It’s not hard to learn, it’s like getting a new phone. After a week it starts to feel natural.
There should be no problem I think, but will likely have non-optimal performance. Only was to know for sure is trying. Note you’ll need to enable options in your BIOS.
I insist on the Linux migration. That machine is underspecd for 2026 Windows, plus Windows 10 doesn’t receive security parches. Begineer-friendly distro are very easy to use, and you can try a dual boot setup to see if he can get used to it. For begineers I usually go for Linux Mint, or ZorinOS.
Maybe another option is see if you can upgrade a little bit the RAM.
I know about the issues with windows 10. Probably my brother knows too. When he discards this machine completely, l shall wipe away every single data and make it tabula rasa. Then I shall install MX Linux.
installing on bare metal means like the way windows 10 is installed right now; the main operating system installed on the hard drive directly in control of the hardware.
backup any files you want to save from win10 to an external drive, usb, or cloud storage. download rufus or ventoy and follow either tool’s instructions on making a bootable usb with the mx linux iso on it.
reboot and hit whatever key the bios screen gives you for boot menu, you may have to go to bios settings and set boot order there to let you boot from usb first before the hard drive if there is no boot menu or boot order key listed.
now you’re in a liveusb mx linux environment. it won’t overwrite anything on the hard drive until you get to the step formatting the disk in the installer, so you can ignore the installer and poke around and try it out before commiting to erasing windows. shutting down and taking out the usb or changing the boot order back will let you boot back into windows.
good luck!
edit: some typos
The CPU is good
The GPU is terrible
It has 4GB of RAM which is about as low as a modern system can go, speed of ram is unknown
It’s got a half Tera of SSD which is cool and a full Tera of HDD which is good for storage which doesn’t need to be accessed very quickly
I say maybe? QEMU should be able to run on just about anything that supports virtualization in the motherboard’s BIOS settings.
That’s a 7th gen i3 man
It’s no Ryzen 9, but there are worse CPUs in existence, I will tell you that. Support for CPUs is a lot easier than support for GPUs.
Does Windows run at all in that amount of memory?
The minimum requirement for win 11 is 4 gigs and it’s tolerable. Windows only needs like half of that. The other half is garbage that gets unloaded when you run low on ram.
i’ve booted win10 under 256mb of ram in the past. it does work.
My computer is working. Why do you ask ?
It’s a really old cpu that was pretty slow to begin with. But it does have the required bits for virtualization, so it should work just fine.
It would be terribly slow tho, slower still than the system already is. And with only 4GB of memory I’m amazed it even runs Windows 10. It would run out of memory as soon as you do just about anything. If you can get some more memory into the thing, it would work better.
The info says desktop? But that’s a low end mobile cpu in there, 15W TDP, optimized to be cheap and have a good battery life. The downside is the performance sucks.
RAM is probably the biggest killer for it right now. The other specs are still viable enough for most basic usage.
The info says desktop? But that’s a low end mobile cpu in there, 15W TDP, optimized to be cheap and have a good battery life. The downside is the performance sucks.
Might be one of those all-in-one-systems where they put laptop hardware into a screen.
Waste of SSD use imho
Who said it was an ssd 😁
The picture.
Its a ssd + a hd, but whatever I guess.
