best system ever

[Robocoastie]

Hi all. I've used Ubuntu off and on in the past and have just finished a complete transition with my main "workhorse" pc - a Core2 Quad, 4GB machine I put together a while back. Here's what I have discovered and probably surprises only newbies.

I installed Kubuntu 8.10 64 bit then tried to update to KDE 4.2 but ran into constant problems so reinstalled again but partitioned my drive better anyway so in a way was beneficial. After that and my usual software installs that I use in Linux I installed Virtualbox, switched on the VT/whatever to get advantage of the virtual extensions and installed Vista Basic and the few windows apps I need.

Here's the part that I hope encourages potential switchers: Vista boots faster and runs smoother and more stable in Virtualbox vm than it does natively. I had been testing Win7 before and concur that there's hope for Vista to be natively fixed eventually by pretending it was never made when Win7 comes out but I for one am sick of paying MSFT to be their guineapig with crappy software (minus the expensive Office that runs good, just their OS is so unstable).

So to anyone tired of dual booting, if you are not using the computer for games and you have the physical memory to spare to make it run smoothly in a VM, then give it a shot - put Windows in a safety cage where it belongs.

[GreyGeek]

Re: best system ever

Last August I purchased a Sony VAIO VGN-FW140E/H laptop, which came with VISTA Home Premium. It has an Intel Centriino2 with 230GB HD and 3GB RAM.

Two weeks ago I have my hard drive to Jaunty and then installed my old XP Pro CD as a guest OS using VMWare 2.5.1, because this laptop, like all new ones these days, did NOT come with a VISTA CD.

On my old Gateway m675prr laptop, 3GHz CPU with 4GB RAM booted XP Pro in about 3 to 4 minutes. This Sony boots it in 1 minute, and it appears to run faster, too.

Another observation: I allocated 10GB for virtual HD space. After installing FireFox3, GoogleEarth5, SketchUp and Qt-Creator I had only 650KB of disk space left! I had installed Qt-Creator out of curiosity just to see how it ran under a VMware guest host, and it does very well. But, I do all of my programming under Linux, so I removed it.

Removing Qt-Creator freed up 2GB.

[sithlord48]

Re: best system ever

i have xp in a virtualbox the only thing i don't really like about vbox is that i can't run the only game that i want to use. (FF7), the direct X support is flakey but for other items such as office programs and similar vbox works very nicely. hope win7 will work as well as xp in my vm, last night i downloaded the RC to try it out. sadly my job forces me to have current knowledge of what ms is putting out.

[marcopl]

Re: best system ever

Here's the part that I hope encourages potential switchers: Vista boots faster and runs smoother and more stable in Virtualbox vm than it does natively. I had been testing Win7 before and concur that there's hope for Vista to be natively fixed eventually by pretending it was never made when Win7 comes out but I for one am sick of paying MSFT to be their guineapig with crappy software (minus the expensive Office that runs good, just their OS is so unstable).

So to anyone tired of dual booting, if you are not using the computer for games and you have the physical memory to spare to make it run smoothly in a VM, then give it a shot - put Windows in a safety cage where it belongs.

interesting discovery. gotta make time to try this. thanx for sharing this observation.

[Fintan]

Re: best system ever

I have been using a guest xp system for years with vm player for all of my adobe stuff and am very happy with the setup using samba to share files.

Faster than native, no anti everything BS... great.