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I support software for a homeowners association which has evolved to Windows 7 using Office 2007(especially Access with a lot of VisualBasic and reports) and Quickbooks as the principal data repositories. I don't expect to be able to continue the support much longer and I don't like what I see in Windows 8 and can't even contemplate Windows 10. I've used Ubuntu in dual-boot situations for years and believe that it may offer a way to continue the legacy programs through the use of Wine and/or VMBox.
I gather that Wine won't run Quickbooks and maybe not Access with VBasic. Has anyone faced a similar situation? Can you recommend VMBox with Ubuntu as the host, running Win7 to support Office 2007 and Quickbooks?
Any thoughts will be appreciated.

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You may already know, you can see how Wine supports different applications here. For example, more recent versions of Quickbooks seem to be supported by Wine (link).

Although, I'm running Ubuntu 15.04 and I have found that not all of the supported programs run with Wine yet. Also, VMBox hasn't worked for me on 15.04. Maybe you should choose an earlier distribution?

By the way, on Windows 7, with an i7 processor (generation 4), VMBox runs Ubuntu terribly slow; I imagine running a Windows OS on VMBox would be worse.

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My PC with the following specs:

6G RAM
4x Intel Core i5-4440S CPU @ 2.80 GHz
64-bit Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS

runs Win 7, 8.1, and 10 superbly in VirtualBox. I have installed and run the full version of Microsoft Office in the Win 7 virtual machine. The only Windows apps I have found that don't work satisfactorily are graphics-intensive games.

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  • This is the answer which I was hoping for with regard to Office although it doesn't necessarily address Visual Basic usage. From your answer, I can't tell if you've tried Quickbooks or not.
    – Hertfordkc
    Aug 29, 2015 at 11:58
  • I have run an ancient version of Visual Basic (3.0) in one of these virtual machines, but not a modern one. I do not have Quickbooks so I cannot test it for you. From what I can tell, if graphics hardware is not involved, windows apps work great, as long as you have a sufficiently powerful PC.
    – Organic Marble
    Aug 29, 2015 at 14:18

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