SW. I have what three systems available to me, two on my usual
work desktop and another in a nearby room, all networked together.
I have two monitors on my desk. Potentially I can run software
actively on either desktop machine.
In truth, I run one. I use the others for alternatives and
backup. I mean here failure backup; that is, if one PC is
down I can go to another with relatively little loss of
productivity. "Relatively" in my case means I'm out a half
day or so playing catch up and updating software. This
happens to me rarely enough that it makes up for the
not doing more regular backups. For me, that is satisfactory.
Apparantly Zeuspaul has more stringent time requirements,
so it's worth the time to him.
My point, which I'm getting to slowly, is that I find multiple
systems in my environment relatively useless. I would
prefer to have everything on one for day to day operations.
Of course, my operations are software development, not trading.
However, I would be (would have been) out of business without
another reasonably similar machine available to work on
in a few cases. Say approximately 5 times in the past two
or two and a half years. Not frequent, but often enough to
scary. In my particular case, the three machines are
a P6 200, a P5 133, and a P5 100, all running Win NT.
These are not powerful machines by today's standards,
but they are ALL capable of running the same software in
a pinch, and I can move resources from one to another,
physically relocating disk drives, video cards, and
monitors if necessary owing to an extended outage.
On my next upgrade, my current thinking is to lose the
second machine on my desktop and replace with multiple
monitors. BUT I definitely want the second (and third)
machines in the background as fall backs. Meanwhile,
they work for backup servers and for other tasks around
the house (my wife uses my "third" backup as her primary
machine, for instance, and it contains the first level
backups for everything critical; it's NT server with
a mirrored disk and also domain controller, since I
am on a corporate network and won't allow the corp
to diddle with my personal files without authorization
<g>.)
Sorry, once again I started to write a note but ended
writing a treatise. Anyhow, there are lots of ways
to use multiple systems without having them equal to
each other.
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