Contemporary hardware, VirtualBox with Win7 guest

I'll apologize in advance for suggesting what is surely madness - sorry!

The short story goes like this - I shot my mouth-off to some local artisans and now a couple have asked me to build them each a table-top 3-axis router. That's great, eh? The problem is that they cannot imagine why one would have to create at one machine and transfer files to another make the part. Further, they imagine that they would prefer to sit at the router and work on the next design while the last is being cut. Personally, I prefer a quiet, mostly dust-free area when designing. They, however, are unconvinced.

The solution I've considered is to install LinuxCNC on contemporary hardware (selling an old P4 with a new machine just doesn't seem right), install VirtualBox with a windows7 guest and install the desired design software on the guest OS... Madness?

My questions are -
1) Has anybody attempted something like this?
2) Can I expect LinuxCNC to run on contemporary (Core i3+) hardware? (all my machines are P4's running EMC2.3)
3) Should I just tell them NO, and set up Samba shares so they can easily transfer files?

Thanks -- When you're done laughing, please comment.

It seems unlikely that Virtualbox will play nicely with a RTOS
(like RTAI or Preemt-RT) That is, it might sort of work but latency
would likely be terrible.

Linuxcnc runs fine on up-to-date hardware
(I'm running it on a H97 MB with a Pentium G3258, a low cost Haswell chip,
a I3, I5 or I7 would be similar and faster) It has _very_ good latency:

freeby.mesanet.com/h97-g3258.png

IMHO doing CAD work at the machine when its running
is ill advised at best.

Thanks for the info. On your H97 are you using integrated video or an add in card?

IMHO doing CAD work at the machine when its running
is ill advised at best.

Quite right!

I am using the built-in video, most problems with built in video are on older hardware