Having Two Computers One One

[Guest hakkamike]

Just a thought for you people out there that are thinking what the )()&()& am I going to do when your better half gets here as far as operating systems go... I am not affiliated with them at all or have vested interest but this has worked really good for us.. Two operating systems one one computer.. http://www.romtecusa.com/

 

Later, Michael Perez

[hypoclear]

nice idea but better yet, have her either bring her Hard Drive with her so that when you boot up you just need to hold down the delete key to bring up the BIO setup where you can switch hard drives. Or have her bring over a copy of the chinese windows version she uses and just install it to your HD. I believe windows 2000 and windows 98 can be duel booted. not completely sure about this.

 

Best of luck! and yes this is a real problem as Bea knows english very well but often switches over to the chinese version to be more effective and faster in searches etc

 

Mark and bea

[Guest hakkamike]

am not talking about dual booting from one hard drive but having two different hard drives, two different systems and being able to do file share also between the two . I think I did not make my self clear sorry.

Later, Michael Perez

[JoeCool]

shame on you for plugging comercial product here!

[Guest hakkamike]

I know im a bad boy or old man buttt it is really great.. Whats the old saying? Mikeiii will try it..

Later, Michael Perez

[keelec]

Oh,

 

I think dual booting sounds a bit drastic.

 

The newer versions of WinDoZe (NT, 2000, ME?, XP Home & XP Pro) allow you to configure multiple user logins, each with quite different login environments (I am not sure about WinDoZe ME, I haven't used it much).

 

WinDoZe XP also has the ability to make a dual boot. (Disclaimer, I haven't tried this, but in theory, it should be quite straight forward).

 

Partition your HDD into 2 partitions (you can do this while installing WinDoZe XP). Install WinDoZe into the first partition. Re-install into the second partition. I believe you can re-install WinDoZe by rebooting from your install disk, or you could use a program like Norton Ghost to clone an install.

 

Right Click on "My Computer", select "Properties", Advanced, and select the Startup and Recovery Options. Choose "Edit Startup Options" if necessary to force the system to come up with the window to select Operating Systems.

 

A commercial product named "Partition Magic" by PowerQuest can be used to aid repartitioning a drive that is already partitioned, and you want to save the current data while creating a new partition for the new data. You should also be able to install 2 hard drives in the computer.

 

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Be careful of installing a drive that was configured on one machine on a new machine. WinDoZe is only partially "Plug and Play". You can easily confuse it. This may only work if the types of computers are very similar. If you have a different brand of MotherBoard, don't try swapping drives and expecting it to work.

 

There is a WinDoZe 2000 / XP Pro (don't know about other versions) command called SysPrep that can be used to force WinDoZe to act like you are reinstalling it (to allow somewhat different hardware). You can download it from Microsoft's website.

 

There is some kind of a grace period with WinDoZe and XP. It will only allow you to use SysPrep a couple of times unless you check the "Don't reset grace period for Activation". However, you may not want to do that for the first run of the utility (Read Microsoft's Notes on their web page, article: 308554. Thus, use it if you have a "Factory Installed Operating System, but don't use it for the first time if you have installed the Operating System from CD.

 

I think I also read somewhere, you can may have to use a command-line-argument with SysPrep to force it to detect all PNP devices (and thus have a prayer to get it to work on very different computers).

 

Sysprep -pnp

 

or

 

Sysprep -pnp -activated to keep it from resetting the grace period and force it to look for PNP devices.

 

 

Even if you put 2 hard drives into the computer, you probably will still want to use the WinDoZe startup options to create a boot file for each drive (instead of doing like I do, manually plugging in and unplugging the drives)!!!!!

 

HAVE FUN, AND REMEMBER THAT COMPUTERS ARE OUR FRIENDS.....

----- Clifford -----

[AZwolfman]

Partition Magic is well worth the price. With it you can have many operating systems on the same computer. I have several on mine, though I use Win 2000 most the time. Have her bring her hard drive. You can have 2 hard drives on one computer. PM can make it easy. PM software also includes Boot Magic, a very handy uitility that makes choosing which o/s to boot at startup a breeze.