Windows XP on an 8 GB SD Card

I have an HP DM3 with Windows 7 64-bit edition. Some games don't work on it. I tried using Virtual PC and the performance is terrible. I have an 8 GB SD Card and my HP DM3 has an SD Card slot.

Is it possible to load Windows XP on this thing and be able to boot off of it and function with it?

 

The first problem is the SDHC reader is going to be seen as a USB storage device. Windows can not install to a USB device without some work done on it.

There are some guides on how to do this for the eeePCs.

The second issue - can your computer boot from SDHC?

 

If it can't boot off SDHC, there's a hack to use grub to preload a bootloader, then boot off the SDHC sd card. People have done this for acer aspire one. Since the card reader is pci-express based, the SDcard is recognize as a SCSI device I believe thus making it unbootable with regular method.

 

The SD card is going to be dog slow (2-6MB/s bandwidth usually) when a standard hard drive should be at least hitting 40MB/s (usually more).

Not even worth trying, sorry. XP will be dog slow, games will load dog slow, and you'll burn out the card in no time with all the read/writes that the OS and programs have to do to run.

 

What games ? Have you tried compatibility mode ?

 

TSE, take a look at VMWare Workstation. I am forced to use XP Pro because a lot of the software I use is not Vista/7 compatible. I have had no issues what so ever with this setup.

 

You can size down / optimize XP with nlite (www.nliteos.com)<cite></cite>, but the limiting factor is going to be the slow transfer speed from an SD card.

Also, if virtual pc is not performing well, VWware will probably not be much better.

 

If your going to do it I would say it better be a class 6 or even better... a class 10 card... a class 10 should be fine with minimal lag

 

You need to double-check that the BIOS in your DV3 is letting the Neo 335 go into AMD-V virtualization. Lots of low-cost/low-performance notebooks are set up to permanently disable whatever virtualization features the cpu may have. If your BIOS is locking out AMD-V, then the netbook isn't going to give you very good performance in any kind of virtualized environment.

Without the AMD-V CPU systems coming active (and being seen by your virtualization software), the very slow HT v1 memory buss of the 335 is going to seem even slower with the 1.6Gz clock speed of the CPU. Regardless of what kind of secondary storage you throw at the problem, if the base hardware isn't up to the task it's not going to be pretty.

Now, assuming that you own a valid XP license.

Check out VMWare or VirtualBox as your XP hosting application. Both should in theory give better performance than the official Microsoft VirtualXP setup. But again, the base hardware you own is pretty anemic (regardless of what you might have paid for it) and may, at the end of the day, simply be incapable of doing what you want.