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How To Make Dual Booting A (Bigger) Pain
the_phenom writes "Thinking of dual-booting your Windoze XP 17" Toshiba P25 laptop? Think again - this one 'uses a DVD with an already setup version of Windows XP Home and then transfers it to the notebook's hard drive,' preventing the normal setup procedure and thus, dual-booting." This reminds me of the unfriendly practice on some PC builders' parts of including an OS "backup" only on a hard-drive partition.
Yet one more reason I'm going to buy an Apple laptop (someday).
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Because some of us feel that Apple is a scumbag company. Their case design is pretentious, their performance is less than what you can get for a comparably priced PC, their CEO is nothing but Bill Gates in a turtleneck, their legal department makes Stalin look like a friendly guy, and their "innovation" isn't. Besides, Processor emulation by its very nature is slower than the original thing. There's no amount of coding in the world that'll make an emulated system anywhere near as fast as a top of the line system. I'd rather trade a bit of convenience in getting my system set up exactly the way I want it than having some asshole from cupertino tell me how I should work with my system. By getting Openstep 5^W^WOS X, I give up a good amount of freedom to get a system exactly the way I want it.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
It's stuff like this that make me wonder why some folks are not using Macs? They simply.....work. And with VirtualPC, (yes, I know unfortunately it is now a MS product) one can have as many boot environments as you want. Linux (pick your flavor), and Windows (again, pick your flavor) all on one machine. Of course I have since dropped even VirtualPC since OS X meets all of my needs now (including running all of my *nix code from my SGI's).
First of all, -1 Troll.
Second of all, we don't all use Macs because we don't want to. It's that simple and I wish you Mac zealots would get that through your thick heads at some point and quit bludgeoning us with your evangelism. It's just never going to work. As for this particular issue, you can use Virtual PC on this Toshiba laptop just as well as you can on a Mac (it's a Mac and Windows product, you know), but the point is this is a three-figure piece of software you're talking about as an add-on. Why should you need to spend extra money just to be able to dual-boot your computer?
Anyway, there are any number of reasons why someone would want to dual boot on a PC and very few of them have anything to do with our PC's not "just working" or secretly wishing we could run OSX. I dual boot because I happen to like both Windows XP and Linux for different reasons. I like having more than one OS on my machine, though I don't have to use either one for any particular reason (I could do everything I really want to under either Linux or Windows and simply wipe the other - however, I choose not to).
But the story posted here seems to be nothing new. Few PC's I've seen lately come with regular old Windows install disks like you can get in a store. Most of them come with "restore" disks that simply put the drive back in the condition it was when you bought the machine. Of course, this is of no help if you somehow type "rd windows" at a DOS prompt by mistake or something and don't need or even want to actually format the drive.
Still, I confess that I don't quite understand how this actually prevents you from setting up a dual boot. Nothing in the article suggests that you can't install the Windows image from the included DVD, then install Linux and set up the dual boot that way. Every distro of Linux that I've used recently has been able to set up a dual boot without requiring a Windows setup disk (why would you need this?). Yes, if you ever do have to reinstall Windows it will probably break your dual boot, but then it'll probably break everything else on your PC too - that's just the way these restore disks work. It's one of the reasons my old Packard Bell 486 was the last pre-built PC I ever bought (I had more than my share of restore disk experiences with that PC, that's for sure).
They simply... don't run the software I want to use. They simply... cost too much for the performance level they provide.
They simply... don't get the games I want to play provided for their native OS within a reasonable time frame.
For Games I sadly have to run Windows still
For everything else, I have my Linux boxen.
I see no reason to pay extra to run OS/X.
Need I go on?
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump