On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 11:58:11AM +0100, Ruth Bygrave wrote:
I put up with dual booting for years before dedicating one computer to each OS I wanted to run. That does take up desk space though.
My standard response to 'wouldn't it be cool to dual-boot?' is 'No.' Any time I actually did it I ended up on one operating system, including:
I can think of a few situations that dual boot is very useful, but then they are all the applications that I use it for. I dual boot a couple of machines, but then I only tend to use the "other OS" for things like firmware flashing tools for mobile phones and car ecus. I really wouldn't dare trust a virtualisation solution to get things right in that situation, theoretically it should be ok but when you've got a few hundred pounds worth of electronics that are expensive to replace a quick reboot seems like a much more sensible idea.
It is also handy having a dual boot machine for checking websites in the "real" IE rather than just trusting one running in wine, but that's mainly because I don't have or want the microsoft fonts installed.
Oh, and another use is having a dual boot setup to test new hardware to see if it really is broken or just not quite supported, perhaps a ramped version of the hardware etc.
Also I solved the gaming problem by buying an xbox ;)
Adam