New life for old XP

fj12ryder wrote:
It seems to me that it is just as easy to keep XP on an older computer if you really need it to run an old program. I have a car manual program that simply won't run on Windows 7, so I run it on a laptop that is running XP. Security is not a concern because the laptop is never connected to the internet. I simply need XP to run this older program. Why go through all the hassle of a VM?

Sure, an old machine will do the trick but running XP in a Virtual Machine means that you only need 1 computer to handle both.

Unfortunately, whether you use a physical machine or a virtual machine you still need to take precautions (such as not connecting to the internet) to avoid getting trojans, virus or malware, especially since MS has now dropped support for XP. If you use virtual software such as VirtualBox which supports snapshots, the if the VM ever gets infected it would be simple to revert to a snapshot that was not infected.