Ubuntu, virtual machines and WIndowss

[niw_uk1964]

Currently my main machine is a Windows machine. It runs on top of a AMD Phenom II 940 3.0Ghz with 8TB of hdd space and 4GB of RAM in a Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H motherboard with integrated graphics.

I don't have any compelling reason to stick with Windows other than some specific software such as Outlook, Photoshop and Dreamweaver so, I was thinking of moving my Windows installation onto a virtual machine run from within an Ubuntu environment on this hardware.

My thinking is to upgrade to 8GB or 16GB of RAM and run a 64bit version of Ubuntu.

Would this be feasible and would my hardware be supported and sufficiently powerful to run this at a decent lick?

TIA.

[jasreca]

I've an Intel QuadCore 2,4GHz with 2GB RAM. I'm running XP in VMware and everytihing works very slick. Even AutoCAD 2008 works like a charm. ABBYY FineReader 9.0 takes some time on larger files (read: scanned PDFs over 500MB), but that's understandable.

I think 8GB RAM could be a bit of an overkill, if the only thing you use are the programs you mentioned.

[niw_uk1964]

I run some other VM's at the same time hence considering more RAM. There's several Windows machines elsewhere on the network and I run a Windows Home Server VM for them to back up to.

Sounds encouraging anyway, I shall get a new hard drive to install to and test on.