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Working on PCs since the days of The Shat selling VIC 20s with his TJ Hooker hair you learn that its the little things that can make your day sooo much easier. From WSUS Offline allowing you to update any version of Windows via DVD or flashstick (as well as having your own Windows Update on a network drive) to Ninite allowing you to install most of the "must have" third party software without any toolbars and fully unattended by simply checking the boxes, its the little tools that really take out the drudgery. Tools like Driver Booster to get rid of the always "fun" driver hunt for old or weird hardware drivers or Comodo Cleaning Essentials to get rid of bugs take out the work for the Fixit guy or those that end up stuck doing the job for their family.
With this in mind allow me to introduce a tool many here may not have heard of which can be extremely nice to have, WinSetupFromUSB or as I like to call it "Every OS in my pocket". Do not let the name fool you, this tool works with not only Windows but also Linux ISOs and even preinstall environments like BartPE or the Linux based recovery environments used by many disc imagers like Paragon B&R Free. So with this one tool you can install OSes, run different Live CDs, restore backups using recovery CDs, all from a single flashstick, VERY handy.
So I hope these little tools help somebody out there stuck doing the "family IT GUY" role and I hope to learn in return what tools do YOU use to make your life easier? What tricks and little pieces of software do you use to make your day run smoother? I'm sure with as many different walks of life represented here we can make this a most enlightening and informative post!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 21 2014, @06:51AM
(A) Drive has single partition containing single host operating system. Further operating systems are loaded as virtual machines in VMware or such.
(B) Drive has multiple partitions and each partition is setup with a different operating system selectable at boot time by Grub4Dos or such.
I am thinking of doing some spring cleaning to my computer system and I am not sure which of those two approaches I should take. Do you guys have a few tips and suggestions? Thanks.
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Tuesday October 21 2014, @11:05AM
YMMV, but for my personal use, I like the virtual machine approach (I use VirtualBox in Linux) because it's much easier to back up and restore the disk images and your config. If your disk goes bad, you just rsync the backups to the new disk and keep going. It's also much easier to take a snapshot if you think you're going to do something that might trash an OS, since all you have to do it copy the disk images. I'm not a big fan of partitions. I ran out of room in a VM last week and just gave a command and doubled my disk size instantly. That's hard to do with a partition. Backing up partitions is a pain.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 1) by Jtmach on Tuesday October 21 2014, @02:22PM
It's going to totally depend on your needs. I would prefer to just have a Linux host with a windows VM when I need it. Except for the fact that my biggest use case of the Windows machine is to play games. So I duel boot for now.
Parenthetically, my favorite setup was back when XP was king. I had it configured so that I could duel boot to either Linux or XP, but also launch each in a VM from the other host. It was super cool, but I could never get it working again on Windows 7, and then I got too lazy to deal with it. I don't boot into Windows that often anyway.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday October 21 2014, @04:46PM
As others have said, it depends on your needs. I used to do dual-boot with separate partitions, now I just have a Linux system with a couple VMs. The reason I switched? When I started dual-booting, I'd boot Linux for a couple weeks, then decide to do some gaming for a while and boot Windows for a couple weeks. For that kind of use where each OS is your full-time system for some length of time, you definitely want separate partitions. Or something like Wubi at least.
These days I boot the Windows VM for a few minutes per month. Testing things in IE or Safari, or trying some ancient game that doesn't need 3D acceleration.
The biggest issue isn't really performance today, performance of VMs on modern hardware is pretty good. The big issue is when you still need hardware access. 3D acceleration, while theoretically possible through some VMs, is always difficult to impossible to get working fully. I can't even get Direct3D 9 working on my WinXP guest in VirtualBox right now. USB support can be questionable. Any esoteric hardware is likely to not work through the VM. Networking can sometimes be a small challenge too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 22 2014, @12:18AM
I was reading the Gentoo forum the other day and a guy noted that a M$ "improvement" caused him problems with extended partitions.
Windows update KB2949927. I big warning for [Windoze] users [gentoo.org]
Fitzcarraldo noted there:
"I prefer to keep the Windows Boot Manager as-is and use EasyBCD to configure it to chainload GRUB 2 on a different partition"
If you trust M$'s junk to behave itself, you will be disappointed.
M$ doesn't know the meaning of "heterogeneous".
-- gewg_