Questions about TRIM on SSD in Windows XP & Vista on dual boot and/or virtual machine

[Sparktown]

I'm building a PC with a 250 GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD. I have a copy of Windows XP & Windows Vista (both 32-bit). I don't really want to pay for a Windows 10 license, because I mostly use Linux Mint these days. I normally just set up a dual boot because there are still a few Windows only programs I use (mostly games). However, I read that Windows XP & Windows Vista both don't support TRIM for SSDs. It sounds like Windows started supporting TRIM with Windows 7 (and didn't update XP/Vista to support it). Is this true?

I also was reading that Samsung Magician might allow support for TRIM under XP/Vista, but I think I might be misunderstanding this. Anyone know about this?

If I ran Windows XP/Vista in Linux Mint as a virtual machine (instead of having a separate Windows dual-boot partition) would that let me run Windows while still using the TRIM support provided by Linux Mint?

Thanks.

 

[Sparktown]

I noticed this was getting reads, but no answers so I thought I would share my research so far.

It looks like Samsung Magician does provide TRIM under Windows XP/Vista. However, it looks like this isn't automatic. You have to enable "Performance Optimization" to turn it on. However, enabling it may prevent you from using the SSD's encryption features (I'm not sure about this yet).

Link to Samsung Magician download/support documentation.

However, I've been told by some Linux folks that this shouldn't matter if I'm running Windows XP/Vista on a virtual machine in a modern Linux distro, since the virtual machine is just a software program running on a Linux, so Linux is still taking care of all the harddrive stuff (including TRIM).