Saturday, February 19, 2011

Flexing my Nerd Muscles

So I have recently been obsessed with having multiple operating systems. I have recently succeeded on my venture, and tried to explain it to Terri. Needless to say, she had no idea what I was talking about and suggested that I write about it and share it with the rest of you. So, here is what I have accomplished.

First, let me start out with what I had.

- Custom made desktop PC
AMD 2.8Ghz Quad core ASUS mother board
7Gb of RAM
1 250Gb SATA HD for the OS
1 250Gb SATA HD for swap storage
1 500Gb IDE HD for storage
ATI Radeon HD 5500 Video Card (1Gb VRAM)
A few IDE DVD Burners
Windows 7 Ultimate x64

- Dell Optiplex 755
Intel 2.33Ghz Core 2 Duo
4.5Gb of RAM
1 80Gb SATA HD for OS
1 500Gb SATA HD for Storage
NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT Video Card (512Mb VRAM)
SATA DVD Burner
Windows 7 Ultimate x86

- Dell Lattitude E6510
Intel Core i7 2.6Ghz Quad Core
4Gb of RAM
1 250Gb SATA HD for OS
1 250Gb SATA HD for Storage
NVidea NVS 3100M Video Card (512Mb VRAM)
Windows 7 Ultimate x64

As you can see, I was using Windows 7 on all of my machines. Well, one day, I decided that I wanted a Mac operating system and my adventure began. I started looking into OSX86 (putting an apple operating system on a non mac computer), and that's when I started downloading A SHIT TON of operating systems. I tried putting Snow Leopard on my laptop, but since the core i7 is still fairly new, the kernel just couldn't handle it. The last thing I wanted was a non stable OS. I then tried to put it on my AMD desktop, and was foiled yet again due to the AMD quad core. I looked over at my spare PC (the optiplex) and it occurred to me that the hardware was very similar to an iMac.

With a successful install on the optiplex, I then turned my obsession to my laptop. After weeks of trying to install Snow Leopard on it with no success, I decided to dual boot XP and 7. That still wasn't enough. Over the last few days, I set up a triple boot of Ubuntu 10.10, Windows 7 Ultimate x64, and Windows XP. So, here is what I have now

- Custom made Desktop
No change (I like my gaming machine just the way it is) it's pretty much just a file server at this point. I am thinking of turning it into a Domain Controller, Exchange Server, and File Server.

- Dell Optiplex 755
OSX 10.6.3 (I'm scared to update it)
Parallels running Windows 7 and Windows XP
All hardware and software are working perfectly

- Dell Latitude E6510
Main OS is Ubuntu 10.10
Triple booting Ubuntu, Windows 7 Ultimate x64, and Windows XP
Ubuntu with VMWare Player running Windows XP (for applications needed for work)


What I have come to realize, is why Apple is the best out of everything I have ever used, and here is why. With an Apple computer I can

- Use the latest OSX with no issues
- Quad boot OSX, Linux, XP and 7 via Boot Camp
and here's the kicker
- Boot into OSX, and using Parallels, connect to a physical HD and use it as a Virtual Machine. So, I could run OSX, Linux, XP, and 7 AT THE SAME TIME. Which is why my dream PC (Mac Pro) runs about $16,000.00.