VIRTUAL MACHINE
You can run lots of apps, so how about lots of operating systems? Virtual machines enable you to run “guest” operating systems on top of the “host”—the OS that runs when you start your PC up. The guests can be extra copies of Windows 10, unstable preview builds, Linux, Chrome OS, or anything else you can think of that will run on an X86 chip.
The hardware side of virtualization goes by many names (VT-x for Intel, AMD-V for AMD), and while it’s possible to do it on all modern CPUs, the ability to do so may be switched off by default—you need to enable it in the BIOS. When you set up a virtual machine, you specify how many processor cores and how much RAM it can access, and these are then hived off and dedicated to the guest.
This means you can run a VM very well on a quad-core chip, as long as you don’t mind offering it only two cores and dealing with a slowdown of your host PC as well. With 16 cores, you can run two VMs with four cores each, and still retain eight to run your host— more than enough.
VMs are useful for testing—we use them to try new features in Insider Preview builds of Win 10 without installing these possibly unstable builds on our host PC [actually, some of us like living on the edge, and run the Insider Preview on our main PC—Ed ]. You can also try Linux without going to the trouble of setting up dualboot, and if you’ve got a legacy application that only likes to run on Win 7, for example, you can keep it in a VM. Because VMs are isolated from their hosts, a misbehaving app can bring down the VM without affecting what you’re doing elsewhere.
Mobile app developers can use virtualized phones to run their creations on, and creating software builds can be a multithreaded process, while web developers can run a virtual web server for testing. These are all useful things in a production environment, particularly for freelancers working from home.