which light weight windows for VM

[d50man]

I want a light weight windows VM for managing some small HTPC (single tuner) processes which windows version should I use 7, 8.1 or 10?
I have plenty of CPU but I want to keep memory usage down.. maybe sub 2GB on a 6gb box

 

[Ultima99]

Isn't 10 highly optimized to have lower reqs than 7 and 8.1?

 

[JBark]

Isn't 10 highly optimized to have lower reqs than 7 and 8.1?

Yep, though even 7 will happily run on 1GB if you're not doing much with it. I've got a Win7 VM with 1GB that just runs the app to monitor our building security system, and used memory rarely goes above 400MB. I'd guess even 512MB would be fine for a VM that doesn't do anything like web browsing or the like that really eats up memory. If the VM can live on an SSD, even better, cause that will help a huge amount if it does swap to disk occasionally.

 

[DontPanic!]

XP or 2000 - according to some reports, it is possible to run XP on PC with 32MB of RAM (even when official minimum for XP was 128MB).

But 7 should be fine running on 1 GB, when you disable all unnecessary features and services.

 

[VonGriffin]

XP doesn't support RDP 8.1 tho

 

[CEpeep]

Server 2012 R2 if your hardware can run in headless mode.

 

[d50man]

host specs q6600@ 3ghz on intel q45 with 6gb and 50gb ssd win8.1 native and 3x 500gb raid5 storage
I want the vm to handle htpc tuner streaming and iso downloads for my house.
I have a pci tuner card an more external usb storage.
The machine is primarily used for max browsing and video conferencing.

 

[mwarps]

You're running 8.1 native and you want to run a tuner VM? In what, virtualbox? with a USB tuner?