how much ram

I have a HP laptop with 1Gb of ram and XP in Virtual Box

Playback in Netflix is pretty choppy so I've been advised to increase the memory allocated to it. How much should I add?

I'm thinking it would be a good idea to use XFCE so I can allocate more RAM to VBox. Ideally I'd like to only have to Ctrl+atl+Backspace select xfce and open a new xfce x session to run VBox in.

I am _very_ happy with my gnome desktop right now and really don't want to have it messed up by installing XFCE.Is this going to be as easy as installing the XFCE desktop thought apt?

It could be RAM allocation but it also might be a video issue. If you are having an issue with DVD playback. Try playing a video file (not a DVD) from your XP install natively. It could be the transfer rate from your DVD drive. Just some things to check out. Hope it helps!

Running xfce will definitely open up some RAM for you, but whether this is an issue or not is difficult to tell. Try installing just xfce (and not the whole xubuntu-desktop package), switch to it via your gdm login screen, and see what happens. You may find it runs well enough for your purposes. It is a pain, but switching to xfce whenever you need to run VBox may be the simple solution. Or try Windowmaker, Openbox, Fluxbox, or anything else which uses less memory than Gnome.

And more memory is always a good thing, so wouldn't hurt. The standard answer when asking how much to add is generally the same: as much as you can afford! :D

The issue might not just be ram as some others here suggested, do some testing.

xfce is not that light, if you want more ram look at things like openbox etc

OK thanks will look at some other solutions then. I don't want to spend more on ram either. IT's $60 per gig which upgrading to 2 gig is out of my budget just to watch movies. It'd be cheaper to dual boot!

I'm only watching streaming netflix in the VB, not DVD's, so that's no problem.

I suppose my question is how much RAM will VB need to play netflix, I can then look for a desktop that will allow me to meet that requirement while leaving the host system running smoothly too.