On 04/03/11 20:53, Graham Davies wrote:
I wrote:
Since you can have only one version of AVR Studio installed at a time
and
AVR Studio does not uninstall reliably, this means that I have to
re-install
the operating system to switch versions.
and then Trevor Woerner wrote:
Wow, that's crazy!
It may seem crazy, I admit. But, once you've realized that this is the
way you're going to have to work you can actually get it down to a
couple of hours from the start to being productive again. My
installation is stripped down with nLite, for a start, and I have saved
off a disk image after the second reboot during the installation process
that I just restore. All I really have to do is reinstall all my drivers
and the applications I need. There are other benefits to frequently
reinstalling a stripped-down Windows, such as blazing speed and great
stability, that you don't get if you use the same install for a year or
so. Also, I avoid installing any Microsoft products.
As a possible work-around have you considered using VMs?
Oh, yes. I have invested scores of hours in trying to get VirtualBox to
work properly. But I just can't seem to get it to play with USB devices,
such as the AVR Dragon and JTAGICE Mk II using the Jungo driver. I even
tried throwing out Windows as the host and starting from Linux and
running Windows in a VM under that. This didn't work because I couldn't
find a Linux driver for my video hardware that has asymmetric
dual-monitor support, which I have grown dependent on.
I find VirtualBox invaluable for all sorts of purposes (with both
Windows and Linux hosts, and Windows and Linux guests) - but USB devices
using a Windows host is still a mystery. Sometimes it works fine, but
most of the time it's unreliable. I find it is very much easier and
more reliable when using a Linux host.
Another advantage of using VirtualBox is that you can have snapshots in
a tree structure. So you can make a basic Windows install, then take a
snapshot. Install a version of AS, then snapshot it. Go back to the
basic install snapshot and start again - install a different version of
AS, and snapshot that. Then moving between versions of AS is just a
matter of restarting your snapshot virtual machine.
There will almost certainly be a solution to your dual-monitor problem
(I have asymmetric dual monitors running with Fedora here), but it's way
off-topic for this list. You can email me directly if you want, but I'm
off on holiday for a week so don't expect a quick answer!
Of course I'm ignoring licensing issues here.
To a certain extent, so am I. I have a legal copy of Windows to do all
the above, but I never activate it. I just reinstall every 30 days. I
have a second legal copy, that *is* activated, dual-booting on the same
PC, that I use for hardware design. I am really, really careful what I
install on that and so far that still flies. Having a very fast and
stable computer is worth a couple of hours of drudgery every month to me.
Graham.
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