Often, folks bring their windoze laptops to the clinic, hoping to make them dual boot. This is an OK option for small budgets and off-warranty laptops, but for new laptops or bigger budgets, it is better to remove the original windoze hard drive and store it for later, and install a new hard drive. Put linux on that, then virtualbox or vmware with a windoze client if necessary.
Someday, that laptop might need warranty service; the windoze hard drive will be needed for that. Or it might be resold, and sadly, most buyers still want windoze. Lastly, dual-boot is tricky. It is easy to lose your data while setting that up. Windoze updates do not share disks properly, and bare metal windoze is a serious security risk. Laptop hard drives are less than $60; for more money, you can get a very VERY fast solid state drive, and be happily downloading PR0N while the rest of us are still booting up. If you care about the data on your disk, you should have a /third/ drive for external backup. Drives fail. Installs and upgrades go bad. Batteries catch fire. And some thieves are stupid enough to steal linux machines rather than high-resale-value apple toys. Note - with only a little effort, the linux hard drive from an older (SATA) machine can be moved to a new machine, or two machines synchronized with rsync and unison. You might need to disable or otherwise deal with UEFI "secure" boot. Still learning about that. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
