[plug] Windows 7

[Jason Nicholls]

I only ever let my Windows run in VMs ;)

On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 12:53 PM, Brad Campbell <brad at fnarfbargle.com> wrote:
> So I've been doing a heap of 3D work recently. I achieve this using the
> windows CAD program in a VM and display it over the network with Spice
> (which rocks). I've been struggling with apparent UI latency and not having
> ever used, nor seen this program on the bare metal I thought it might be a
> VM artifact, so I shrunk my home partition and made room for Windows on the
> disk.
>
> It's been a *long* time since I've used windows outside a VM, so I booted
> the install CD and told it where to put itself. Away it went.
> What the installer does not actually tell you is it will put Windows
> wherever you tell it to, however it will also install the bootloader in the
> first partition it comes across that is marked active in the MBR. Yay, so
> Windows installed and simultaneously wiped my root partition.
>
> I painstakingly restored everything from backups and then found of course
> windows would not boot because I stomped it's bootloader, so booted Windows
> into rescue mode and used the old /fixboot to re-install the bootloader. Of
> course it dutifully installed it (you see where this is going?) on the first
> partition that was marked active and thus stomped my root *again*.
>
> *grumble*. For future reference, create your partition for windows *and*
> mark it active before you boot the Windows CD, then swap it back to allow
> grub to chain to the windows partition on the rare occasion you want it.
>
> How can such a defective POS be so popular ?!?
>
> Anyway, after a second root restore and much fiddling I got it working,
> installed the CAD software on the Windows bare metal and found out it's no
> faster. So from a real usability standpoint for *complex* and very hungry
> windows software a VM is now a very practical and competitive solution. The
> only thing the bare metal brought me was nicer 3D textures using the fruit
> on the graphics card, but from a day-to-day usability perspective the VM is
> just as good (it's actually better as my desktop has 16G and a 3.6G proc
> while the VM box has 32G and is overclocked to 4.7G).
>
> Hooray for KVM. Boo for Windows.
>
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-- 
Jason Nicholls
jason at mindsocket.com.au
0430 314 857