Virtual Machine and gaming

[Gregory923]

I am trying to learn about VM more and I was just wondering can I VM either Vista or Xp in a way that I can basically split my computers processing power in half. I have a Core 2 Duo processor and dual 8800 video cards with 4gb of ram. Ideally I would like to be able to have one computer with two monitors and two keyboard/mouse so I can have two people be able to play games off of it at one time. Games such as COD4 and the like. It would be amazing to be able to leave a computer at home for when I go to LAN games. And I don't really care if I had to turn the graphics way do to be able to play like this.

[Gizmo-guy]

I run VirtualPC by MS for older games that don't wanna run in XP. What you are wanting to do is not possible with VirtualPC, atleast not to my knowledge.

[peti1212]

Hey Gregory, I used VM before although I do not think you would be able to do that. I am not pro at it, although to my knowledge you cannot do that.

[Methious]

I've never seen it done, I've seen people that tried and ended up with a two motherboard machine that would but that's two computers in one rig.

[Kougar]

This is not physically possible, unfortunately! The biggest reason is the GPU... you can run Windows within Windows, but you can't split the GPU for two people to game with at the same time.

Methious is spot on, you would need a two-computers-in-one-case configuration or something similar. While you could split your CPU between the host OS and the virtual OS, the performance won't exactly be great. If seriously considering virtualization a Quad CPU would be better to more evenly distribute both OS loads and the programs/drivers/overhead they are both incurring.