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I encapsulated my old windows machine into a VM - it gets fired up to run Quicken and another accounting program for which there are no reasonable client based substitutes. The VM boots fast, I have a "safe" copy of the VM image incase of a viral compromise, and it's out of the way of my normal workflow. Windows machine free for about a decade.

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Do you have any pointers to how to do this? I have a dual-boot Win7 machine I would like to have run Windows as a VM in Linux, to keep the proprietary executables I need for work running with a smaller security footprint.

If you have Windows installed on separate hard drive (or partition), you can boot it directly with Qemu in Linux. No need to do anything fancy, just use existing installation. If you have two graphic cards, it is even more fancier with GPU passthrough.

Something here, might not be the best guide: https://superuser.com/questions/342719/how-to-boot-a-physica...

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