Linux - thumbs down

[The Natural Philosopher]

Only RAM. windows in idle mode shouldn't chew any CPU

And when suspended it doesn't chew any RAM either.

Damned sight faster to restore an open VM session that boot windows...wait...coffee... twiddle thumbs....

Personally I'd sooner just swap a disk over or boot into a

Then you are barking mad.

VM allows you to run two systems in parallel concurrently with windows having FULL access to the host file systems.

It allows you painless backup and restore of the virtual machine to as many snapshots as you have disk space for.

It allows superfast booting of the windows WITHOUT shutting down the host.

It allows windows to be suspended in seconds to free up ram and CPU if you need them, and resumed in seconds when you want it back.

The only downsides are that the hardware is NOT fully under windows control and sometimes that means some hardware wont work the way it was intended, and it means that the screen is a bit slower.

The only possible reason I could have for a real live native windows would be to play games on.

Or if I had some obscure hardware that ONLY ran on native windows.

As it happens, I don't have either requirement.

[mick]

Hmmm.... gThumb is getting that way. I've never used Lightbox so I can't judge. :)

[The Natural Philosopher]

Big on RAM, small on CPU is my experience.

RAM is 'hard allocated' - windows cant cope with dynamic allocation of its core RAM!

[Clive George]

I'd be a lot less happier with the locked down W7 I have if I didn't happen to have admin privileges too :-) But yes, it does seem to be making support of the basic desktops less painful.

[Bob Eager]

I think it only really happens in my department. Of course, my 'main' machine (FreeBSD) is completely unmanaged.

[Andy Burns]

The O/S doesn't really know what the hypervisor is doing with the physical RAM, it can be "ballooned" away from the O/S or the hypervisor can spot those identical pages in use by multiple VMs and make them all refer to the same physical page (with CoW for any changes of course).

[Huge]

I've been working in IT since 1975 and I think I've seen about 3 or 4 new ideas in that time ...

[Bob Eager]

vi is for newbies.

[Tim Streater]

It's also on every unix box. So I use that and a proper editor like TextWrangler. Knickers to everything else.

[Bob Eager]

I use ed...!

[The Natural Philosopher]

nah. it was back in the day the ONLY text editor that was ALWAYS available on a *nix system

I shudder to think how many lines of code I wrote in it...

[The Natural Philosopher]

thank god for GUIs. Now I use geany

[Huge]

OMG, an editor holy war. On uk.d-i-y.

All editors suck.

[Bob Eager]

Your day is later than my day, when the answer to that would have been 'ed'.

[Cursitor Doom]

You must be very rich. I'm still running a PDP-8.

[Cursitor Doom]

I'm very pleased for you and your fancy hardware. When there's a virtual environment that'll run on a PDP-8, by all means give me a shout.

[Bob Eager]

Well, there was TSS/8....!

[Bob Martin]

You're right - I misunderstood what he told me. But isn't standalone VMWare a modified Linux?

[Tim Watts]

Except DEC/LSE (built on EVE). That was the only good editor ever.

But vim is a close second...

[Tim Watts]

No.