Re: Dual Boot {was DOS Emulator}

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from "J. R. Fox"  on Wed, 22 Jan 2003
12:04:38 -0800


>> I've dual/triple/quadruple-booted ever since there was an alternative to DOS,
>> and I'm incessantly going back and forth. It sucks. Someday I'm gonna get
VPC.

> Can't really argue with you there. It helps that I only boot to W2K infrequently,
> and keep data files that must have a common access in shared (FAT-16) partitions.

I should be honest. What I really do most of the time -- and this is a very
practical, feasible alternative for *many* people -- is run two computers
simultaneously, side-by-side: a desktop, which is loaded and always runs OS/2;
and my notebook slash traveling companion, which runs W2K. They are networked
together at 100Mbps; each can read and write the other machine's files with
absolute transparency. Since the notebook is always with me, I do all my Email
from it, so that I collect all msgs in one place. Otherwise I mostly use the
OS/2 machine. Both machines have identical external monitors, keyboards, and
optical mice -- they feel the same. Importantly, both machines *can* be
dual-booted into the opposite OpSys.

The benefits are total freedom, and an end to this discussion thread. You've
got it all, all the time: full power, no waiting. You can set one machine to
work at an arduous task (e.g. a 15-hour compile of all the 20,000+ messages at
XySearch) and still work full out on the other. Or you can do a bandwidth- and
processor-intensive task on one machine (listen to an on-demand feed of BBC
Newshour -- by far the best English-language newscast on the planet, no
contest), with the other machine entirely free. You can run NotaBene in
Windows, and XyWrite on the other OS -- and talk to each other! Mozilla or
Opera, and IExplorer. Windows has just one thing going for it, and that's
applications -- lots of them, and interesting ones too. Most of them are
written for best performance in W2K/XP -- NT is the benchmark, not 9x (I would
never go back.)

In short, it's perfect. Machines are CHEAP these days. You get an Intel
Pentium 4 desktop running at 2.0GHz with a 20Gb hard disk, plus a monitor, for
$599 -- from IBM! It's nuts. Not to mention Lindows from Walmart, at $199.
And *still*, processor power doubles every 18 months, while prices head toward
zero. The expense of computing is almost exclusively time, not equipment --
our time. I probably recapture about 10-25% of my day by having two machines.
I figure if you spend more than a few hours in front of a computer every day,
you deserve a comfy setup. (Put a third, old, castoff machine on a shelf
somewhere, and let it be your LAN server and firewall robot, doing 24x365
broadband network address translation for the other two machines -- never have
to touch it -- and you're in heaven.)

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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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