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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mr.mark who wrote (9346)	11/22/1999 1:15:00 AM
From: peter michaelson	Respond to of 14778

hi mr. mark - just abusing your name here to post this article and link winmag.com Speaking of emulation... Every now and then there comes a piece of software or hardware that just knocks the wind out of you and leaves you gaping (and gasping!) VMWare (available for free evaluation at www.vmware.com) did that to me. VMWare allows you to create a virtual PC inside your PC, which runs at about 2/3 the speed of your real PC, and into which you can install ANY OS or software you like. You can boot NT or Win2K, run VMWare, and run another copy of NT or Win95, or Linux, or BeOS, or even good old DOS. Whatever you want. It sounds too good to be true, I know. I thought it would turn out to be a fakery of some sort, a computer version of the lead-to-gold "alchemy" experiments that 19th-century charlatans were so fond of. But I set it up on a Win2K box and got both NT 4.0 Server and Red Hat Linux running side-by-side in VMWare sessions. Not one person who came into my office to see this left without being goggle-eyed. It works, it works well, and it doesn't require specific "extensions" for any given OS: it'll work with stuff that isn't even written yet. It's a work of genius, frankly. The program can intelligently scale memory requirements too, so you can run several virtual machines side by side on a decently equipped PC without running out of gas. Best of all: you don't need a separate partition for each OS, just a directory where you can put a virtual-disk file. (The biggest hit on your system is free space: you really need at least 1GB per "guest OS" to run VMWare well.) Network interfaces, floppy disks, CD-ROMS are all supported transparently. I almost went nuts ruminating over the possibilities. Obviously, you can use it to beta-test new OSes without repartitioning your system or, if you're really lionhearted, use it as a test bench for writing your own OS. It's a great way to test software without having to tear down and reformat your system over and over again -- just make a backup copy of the virtual drive that holds your OS installation, and use that. If you're interested in experimenting with a new OS, get it.