The Reboot Problem

One annoyance of the modern world is that it is often the case that not every piece of software you desire is available on one operating system. This leads to the development of dual (or triple ... ) boot machines. Unfortunately, the process of rebooting into a different operating system is annoying and time consuming. Several solutions exist.
  1. Get a second machine. Expensive and a waste of hardware most of the time.
  2. Get a pool of machines and make them available for remote use with VNC. Also somewhat expensive and certain things like playing movies can't be done over remote VNC.
  3. Install vmware and run one OS underneath another. Proprietary and RAM hungry, but probably cheapest per user.
jcl@cmu.edu