MS Vista vs MS Office Suite

[Oldman]

Oldman, I dont know what you mean by two boot drives / caddies. Sounds like a solution to my nausa.  :(  I bought a real nice machine about 18 months ago and your approach may be a solution to "staying current" for a few more years.   :-[

I see Gizmo next week he can probably explain it slow enough i get it  ???

My hard drives are in removable caddies... they come out just like a 3 1/2" floppy. I really have three. The one on the bottom of the three is in a dead holder... it is not wired to the system...it holds the bootable drive that I'm not currently useing. The top holder is my boot drive holder. The second one down is a slave... mass storage drive.

XXXXX <----bootable drive holder.
XXXXX <----slave drive (mass storage) holder.
XXXXX <----just a holder for the boot drive I'm not currently using.

All drive holders have a locking on /off switch. I only turn on the slave when I wish to back up something. Lets say I'm on my business drive and I want to game. I turn off my system. Remove the business drive out of the bootable drive. Put in my gaming drive in the bootable drive holder. Place my business drive in the holder that is not wired to the system (bottom holder.) Turn the lock on the bootable drive and then turn on the power...  Ping A Bang... it is like having two systems in one box. Plus the slave drive is one heck of a back up device for your data, and it is faster than any other type of back up medium.

Next, if you really have some very private important information, instead of taking a change that someone can access your information you just pull that drive out and lock it up in a safe....and if needed you can take it with you and put that drive into another computer.

[West Coast Kansan]

Very  8)  It seems to me I should do this as a true back up for this machine.  Just create a mirror image and any HD failure is just that. I still have everything on a second drive until the first is changed. I have worried about that since it seems to be getting loud.   ;) Wonderful if they are available is 200 gig sizes? Trip to Frys for mothers day I think.  ;D

[Oldman]

My drives by my gaming friends standard are somewhat small at 250 gigs... If you mod your computer to use the removable caddies MAKE SURE  to get only aluminum drive and caddy holders... the steel and plastic units hold in to much heat.

About your back up drive being loud I cannot suggest enough that you pull it from your unit. Put in a new back up drive and then place your old backup in an external drive and move the date to the new backup drive. External drives are really cheap... mine cost me about 60  bucks...  I will post images of my unit later so you can get a good idea of my system.

Edit: Living in a major storm state, I take comfort that all I have to do is pull my backup data (storage) drive out of my system  and my SECOND backup data (storage) drive that in my external drive and no matter what I will have two copies of my business information.  Either drive can be install into a new computer.

Ya this will add a couple of hundred of dollars to you overall,but at least you don't take a change or at least limit your chance of losing your important data....
Olds

[Oldman]

Here are the images...





I hope this helps with the understanding of what and how I protect my information. Normally the slave is not on unless I'm backing something up. I just turned it on so you could see it running--that is why the temp is 2 degrees C lower than the main drive. At the moment they both now read 29.1 C.  BTW Seldom do I ever get on the net with my B-Drive. Only to check my B- E-mail, and that is to my own dedicated secured server.

Plus I also have that external hard drive for a second backup... the reason I go over-board is once upon a time I had a game hacker get to my system. 

[West Coast Kansan]

Olds, Thank you greatly.   :)  The pictures really helped,  ;D Take Care

[Oldman]

You are welcome... now to get back to the problem... with this system you can run XP and Vista... but on two different bootable drives. As I said the best of both worlds...

[Habanero Smoker]

I was doing my annual spring maintenance, and while looking for the latest drivers and patches I can across this little nugget from MS. MS Virtual PC 2007 will allow you to run more then one OS on your machine, and you can switch back and forth with a click on the mouse. So if you have old programs that ran on Windows MS DOS, Window 95; 98 etc. you can install that OS on your machine with Vista or XP Pro, and run the old applications under the OS it was designed for. Virtual PC will run on Vista and XP Pro. Make sure you check out the Demo.

I've just down loaded it, and of course I will fully back up my drives before installing this program.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/overview.mspx?wt_svl=20323a&mg_id=20323b

[IKnowWood]

Virtual PC did a decent Virtualization job for hosting multiple OS system for years.  I used to use it a good bit, bit their processor translations was sub-optimal for my systems.

I have migrated to Parallels which is going much better, direct virtualization calls to the chipset is much faster.  And also supports multiple OS instances, running simultaneous, I have a XP instance running now in virtual space that is clocking real solid to other systems at work.  We are not yet allowed to install Vista, evantually I will get one going as well for testing, once allowed.

[Gizmo]

The good thing about Microsoft is there are 3 or more ways of doing everything.  Lots of great choices to solve the problems.  Olds, those Vantec drives look really nice.  IKW's Virtual PC is a nice option for the occasional need to run a program in a different OS environment without dedicating a lot of hardware.  We sometimes use VMWare to set up different environments for testing patches or simulating diffrent installs.  I had a computer (Windows NT 4.0) that I set up with 2 different boot modes.  The Windows NT 4.0 environment and a Windows 98 environment.  I needed the Windows 98 OS to run a program that I had to program a Casio Databank Watch (used the monitor to flash the programing code to the watch).  The NT 4.0 would not allow software to run that used direct calls to the hardware and therefore the software could not control the video card output to the monitor.  For that type of application, I don't think the VMware or the Virtual PC would work which is why the other options (Multiboot or swapping hard drives) would still be the only 2 choices.

[Habanero Smoker]

I had used the old version of MS Virtual PC when they first started giving it out for free, and it did not run smoothly on my machine. I'm hoping this version will run a lot faster and smoother. The demo appears that it should work a lot better.

[IKnowWood]

Habs, loads of XP are working in about 30 seconds from started the saved memory stack in parallels and running real fast.  it could be better I am sure but for my needs more than fast enough.