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These days we're accustomed to running 2-3 copies of virtualized OSes.

Well, not Vista, right? I thought you had to own Windows Vista Incredible to have permission to run virtualized copies. Or was it Windows Vista Ultimate Smackdown? I can never remember.

Of course, we in the Mac world have a much easier time remembering which versions of the Mac OS can be easily and legally run in virtual machines: None of them.

Of course, we in the Mac world have a much easier time remembering which versions of the Mac OS can be easily and legally run in virtual machines: None of them.

Not true. You can run Leopard server virtualized. I haven't tried it but I know people who offer VPS's with it. And yes, it's completely legal. Both Parallels and VMWare support it.

http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2008/01/virtual-leopa-1.html

Leopard server can legally only run in a VM on Apple hardware though AFAIK.

I can legally run (some versions of) Windows on any of our Linux machines, loading it over the network, provided we don't exceed the license limit. This is _exceptionally_ useful as it allows access to (office|windows only apps) for the 1% of the time it is useful, without paying for the 99% of the time it isn't.

To do the same for Macs would require us to buy an entire set of Apple hardware. Rather pointless in a shop where most people use Linux out of choice, and most work is done inside a web browser or Eclipse.

OK... there's a bit of comparing apples and oranges here. Macintosh is a proprietary hardware platform and MacOS X requires it to run. You can run Windows and Linux on the same hardware because both of them support it and VM software easily uses hardware facilities through virtualization. VMWare and Parallels do not emulate everything.

So it makes sense that you can't run MacOS X on non-Apple hardware since it was never meant to do that. On the other hand, Apple supports Windows XP and Vista on its hardware and have written a ton of drivers to do just that. Linux folks have done the same and they have written drivers for Mac hardware. Sure, there are such things as Hackintoshes but they have a ton of issues (sometimes fans don't work. graphics doesn't work, drivers missing etc).

For Apple to do what you want, they'd have to license VMWare and other VM vendors internal Mac specs so that VMWare can emulate those on a machine that doesn't have them. And this is not beneficial to Apple at all.

The fact that they have valid business reasons not to support my use case doesn't magically make my need go away.

It's perfectly reasonable for them not to want some people as customers, but virtualisation on Apple only hardware covers nothing like as many people's needs as virtualisation on any hardware and any underlying OS.

Oh, good. I apologized too soon -- I forgot about Leopard server. Now I can revert back to my default sense of smug superiority. ;)

"I just bought a new laptop with Vista on it. The poor puppy was spending about 10 minutes to boot up and cool down..."

Vista makes a bad first impression. It gets faster the more you use it, rather than being fastest out-of-the-box.

This may sound crazy, but here's what I did last time I set up a Vista box. I booted, logged in, then walked away and let the thing sit idle overnight.

All the scheduled disk cleanup, disk defragmentation, spyware scanning, indexing, etc., ran overnight and the machine was quite a bit snappier the next day.

I then proceeded to reduce the frequency of some of those tasks and turn others off completely. You don't have to mess around with services for most of those things, though, because they have real GUIs.

In the end, I was able to get pretty usable performance on the PC, which at the start had appeared to be unusably slow.

"After that it could barely breathe on its own 1GB of RAM, without any applications running ... The damn thing needs 1GB of RAM only to stay barely alive on its own."

With respect, what makes you believe this? The figure in Task Manager? I know just enough about Windows' memory management to understand what a weak grasp I have on the meaning of the figures in Task Manager. Certainly the figures shown don't change much when I open up a bunch of apps.

This may sound crazy

It only sounds crazy because this is 2008. 1968 you could have gotten away with running all your tasks overnight...

What makes the situation worse is that the laptop manufactures work with Microsoft to include 'Vista only' hardware, making it difficult to get XP running on the machine - my DV6000t is a prime example.

Thank goodness that Ubuntu, SUSE and Fedora all run great (fast, cool and stable) with less configuration than XP takes to get rigged to work on here. Since I am running Ubuntu, and not running the hog that is 'Vista', I have plenty of machine "left over" to run Virtualized XP at lightning fast speeds...

Paint a turd(Vista) gold(fight back ads) all you want, you just have shiny shit at the end of the day...

On a related note: I think it would be interesting to see how many prior Windows-only users were turned to the world of Linux because of Vista being poorly released at a time when the Linux environment was moving towards its current usability and hardware support.

Most new computers that come stock with Vista have the ram available to run it(mine had 2 gigs). Do you honestly think Dell would install Vista on their PCs if they thought it would make them look bad? If someone's computer is running slow because of Vista, they won't be blaming Vista, they'll be blaming Dell.

As far as old computers are concerned, the person who actually bothers to upgrade the OS on their old PC, will probably have a top of the line PC that actually has the RAM to run it.

The problem with this is that I want my RAM to run applications on it, not just the OS alone. I want to say to Vista: "fuck off, this is my RAM, for my applications, to solve MY problem, not yours".

We don't buy RAM to run operating systems, we buy RAM to run software, and OS must be our "Santa's little helper", not "Santa's rape-me-in-the-ass hairy inmate".

Without comparing the price of 512MB RAM seven years ago with the price of 3GB now the whole comparison is rather pointless. Maybe Microsoft should've better communicated Vista RAM requirements to computer vendors. I know someone who bought a computer with 512MB RAM and Vista on it. Imagine that!