I’ve blogged previously about how I hate dual boot configurations. I prefer the safer alternative, running a virtual machine on your parent system, running virtually whatever OS you want inside this VM.
I chanced upon Virtualbox as a good free alternative to Virtual PC 2007. Installed, booted up an ISO of Ubuntu 8.10 and after a bit of tweaking, this was the result. Efficient utilization of the dual monitor setup, if you look at the screenshot. The only flipside, I had a memory Utilization of about 2.14GB with Vista and Ubuntu running side by side. Processor Utilization was a measly 15% on the XPS.

For all you Virtual Machine junkies out there, check out VirtualBox, highly recommended!

I’ve finally gotten over my obsession with customizing my desktop, the latest being this. Figured out, its not worth the performance hit, even though the XPS should be able to handle it comfortably. So, end result, I’m back to the plain jane Vista look, patching the theme files to have a super-transparent theme, with no widgets and the likes on the Desktop.

The only program that seems to hog memory perenially, is Firefox, though…

Alright, the real purpose of this shitty post is to check whether Twitter gets automatically pinged when I click submit..

Update: - It does!

Considering I’d quit Reliance by the end of last month, and would no longer be in Mumbai, the geek in me began to pester me to move to a mobile computing solution. Granted, the N82 was doing more than well until then, but I’d need to have another machine. Brains racked, head banged, days were spent thinking. Even flirted with the thought of having a Desktop + Netbook combo, sonsidering I’d just upgraded the graphics card on my Desktop to an ATI Radeon HD2600, plus had purchased a licensed copy of Windows Vista. Not to mention the 22′ Samsung Syncmaster monitor. But, as luck would have it, SEV was upgrading his home PC in Mumbai, and quite a few gadgets changed hands leaving me free to buy a laptop, without worrying much about getting rid of the desktop.

The answer came in the form of a custom built Dell XPS M1530, after significant research and analysis about it. A 2.4Ghz Core2 duo with 3gigs of RAM, a 320GB 72000rpm HDD and an NVidia GeForce 8600GT graphics card, giving me a Windows Experience Index of 5.3. Incidentally, I’ve retained the 22′ monitor, which basically gives me two 1440X900 resolution screens stacked up against each other, to give one Windows Desktop that looks something like this.

Sheer computing bliss, this. I’ve been enjoying every single moment on this until now, and its bound to stay that way for a while.