would a Acer Aspire Go 15 15.6in Ryzen 7 16GB 512GB Laptop be OK for exploring VMs

I have a limited budget but would like to explore the use of virtual machines. My current laptop cannot run a single VM at anything but a snail's pace.

I am tempted to buy this laptop. Acer Aspire Go 15 15.6in Ryzen 7 16GB 512GB. It could be upgraded to 32 GB RAM and seems to get good reviews. I use my laptop for browsing and do nothing intensive. I do want to see how VMs work and envisage running no more than two. I want to learn about virtualisation and am interested if they obviate the need for conventional image backups such as using Macrium Reflect. My laptop is showing its age, has a dodgy touchpad and a glitch where the battery icon shows it is not charging when it is. The battery life is less than 50% of its original capacity and a new battery would cost me £50 or more for a genuine replacement. OEM replacements sometimes don't really work as advertised and I have one which has to be disconnected frequently to make it charge.

Any tips would be very welcome. My budget is £500.

yeah, i don't see you having a problem trying to run a VM on that. The biggest item of concern would be disk space really. They can eat up a lot of disk space, but i usually use the expanding virtual disk so it starts small and only grows as it needs to.

@kelper

I can't see any problem at all -- VM's (including Windows one's) can run from external devices -- those Nvme (SSD type) 1 or 2GB capacity are quite cheap -- look for Black Friday deals etc - plus "mini" enclosures available which connect to the computer via USB3 / USBC connection. Response very good. You can get passable W11 VM's with as low RAM as 4GB although 8GB is better.,

You can make the whole thing even more convenient

Copy (clone) your internal W11 system to the external device (use something like the still available Macrium free so you can have the external device with bitlocker disabled - you don't need all that rubbish when testing VM's !!!

I'd disable as well secure boot for a VM - can't see why you'd want it in any case never mind for testing VM's

Then install the boot manager on to the efi partition on the external device -- if the efi partition is say S and the Windows partition on the external device is say W then as administrator cd W:\windows\system32, w:, bcdboot w:\windows /s S: /f UEFI.

Then boot the external device BUT BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE : look for reg key in Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control

If there's PortableOperatingSystem key set it to '0'. If there isn't one create it and set it to '0' and now re-boot.

Hint though keep the Windows OS size small - put user data etc on other devices / partitions). A windows OS of around 80 - 100 GB is easily big enough for a system with loads of applications.

If you install the W11 VM from scratch then you'll need to install via DISM /Apply-Image as Windows won't install directly to an external device. Easy way is create W11 install media via rufus and you can select the options to bypass secure boot and a few other things which you might want to consider -- and then when installing run the install media -- choose repair system -->command prompt when you are then in Windows PE/RE mode - you can then use diskpart and the dism and bcdboot comm

Cheers
jimbo