My 8 year old computer, probably the /sda hard drive, but possibly more is unresponsive. It has on it Windows 7 in sda1 and debian stable in sda2, etc. I am backed up on a NAS. I was going to delay a year or more longer, but I am moving up a notch or two with a new computer. And no, I will probably not put siduction on that one, but it is a knowledgeable group here. I have read some up on lvm and youtube videos, I can handle that easily.
I am leaning towards using testing and staying with Stretch when it turns stable. However I would have a new enough kernel with backports. I wil have 8 GB of ram. My board will be a gigabyte GA-H81m Intel 81 socket with Intel HD4400 integrated video. They seem to work for most people. Just ethernet on the board. I do have old ethernet card, sound card and 512 mb video card around in case of real snafus.
So my main question is, does it make sense to go with xen for my windows 7 install My cpu will be an i-3 4170 Haswell Dual core which has VT-x but not VT-d. The xen irc and my reading seem to agree that HVM guest(s) will work, but I will not have PCI passthru to HVM guests as my chip does not have VT-d. I will not be using 3-D acceleration in windows, just tax programs, possibly sigil, phone management software, etc. 15 years of dual booting is getting old,
QUBES does look interesting, being one more level of security on top of xen, but I think I will be busy enough with the install and using LVM and UEFI for the first time. Would I be satisfied with using Windows 7 about once every month with XEN or just go with dual booting like I alway have? Peace out.