What is the purpose of running duel boot!

donetao

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Hi! For you geeks that are bored and are running a duel boot operation; please explain to this old man what the purpose is. I have trouble with running W7. I have one computer, one OS and I'm getting along nicely with that:lol:
I read all these things about sand boxing and VM's,but I haven't gotten in to that. I did try sand boxing one time,but to me it was a waste of time and I really didn't think I needed it.
Please convince me why I should try either:D One reason for duel booting I suppose is to be able to answer questions:thumb:
Gary!
 
So you can switch from one OS to another. Some software won't run on one OS but will on another. If you can switch from the one that won't to the one that does, saves you a lot of grief.
Like dual booting W7 and W10 to be able to compare them wisely.
 
I keep several VMs nearby for testing and whatnot. I maintain a windows VM that I can sysprep and image for folks' machines. That and the ability to take snapshots make vms my choice. I haven't tried dual boot in a long time. I'd have to brush up on the process if I was to do it again.
 
I personally haven't used dual boot in years, I prefer VMs. I have multiple VMs on my machines, I have VMs of XP, Vista, Win 2000, Win ME, Win 7, Win 8.1, Win 10, Win 98, Win 95, WFW 3.11, Dos 6.22 as well as quite a few different Linux distros. I like to keep VMs of different OSes so that if someone asks a question about one of them, I can fire it up and take a look.

An advantage of VMs over dual boot is that with dual boot you can only run 1 OS at a time, at boot time you need to decide which OS you wish to boot and then boot it. With VMs, I can have several OSes booted and running simultaneously (provided there's sufficient RAM). I can shut down one OS and bring up another with ease, all without needing to reboot the computer the VMs are running on.

The disadvantage to a VM is performance, an OS running in a VM doesn't get the full benefit of the cpu, memory or video of the host machine. For instance VMs don't work well for gaming.
 
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