another convert

[jiml8]

A friend of mine has two businesses, and she is pretty much clueless when it comes to computers.

A couple of years ago, I built her a high-end workstation when she outgrew her previous computer. On this new machine (at her insistence) I installed Windows 7 - though I tried to convince her to go with linux and run the Win7 as a virtual machine.

At a later point, she decided she wanted another computer because she wanted to keep her businesses totally separated. I convinced her to take advantage of that high end hardware she had (at her insistence, when I built it, by the way) and if she wanted to keep her businesses separate, deploy a new Win7 installation in a VM. So she purchased a second monitor, we upgraded her video card to make it work, and I deployed VMware Player for her and installed a new Win7 installation.

This worked very well for her; she had her host Win7 with one business on one screen, and her guest Win7 with the other business on the other screen.

She then hired a service to remotely support her so that she did not have to keep pestering me. (whew!!).

In the last few weeks, she's been having more and more trouble with her system, and her service took a long time figuring out what the problem was. It turns out her system hard drive was failing...after just under 2 years (seagate 1 TB SATA drive). So we discussed it, and she bought a 1 TB SSD to replace the drive.

Last friday, I tried to migrate the win7 native installation to that new SSD. I have many tricks in my bag (even for Windows) but ultimately I gave up. The drive was failing, the registry was corrupted, the partition table was corrupted, and I couldn't get the migrated copy to boot all the way up from the SSD. I got it as far as the login screen, but the corrupted registry caused problems I could not overcome. This is, after all, Windows and that gawdawful registry is just horrible when it comes to maintenance and repair.

Now, last fall she saw me replace 5 hard drives with two SSDs in just a few hours with no problems (and this, when I decided to replace my SCSI subsystem after a double-drive failure which carried out both my system drive AND my local backup of system drive) - and most of those few hours were spent copying things from my NAS for the reload.

So she's very upset: "why does this have to happen? Why is Windows so difficult?" She knows the answer: "they want me to buy a new computer..." which, of course, is a big part of it.

I said: "use Linux". She said: "I need Windows for my work". I said: "you see how VMs work; since you have to reload your one business anyway, just reload it as a VM hosted in Linux.

She agreed, and actually got a bit enthusiastic after I showed her around Mageia a bit. She had been thinking about purchasing photoshop, and seeing the gimp made her very happy.

So now her big workstation has Mageia 4 running on it. The Win7 VM that handles one of her businesses had a bit of trouble starting in Linux VMware Player, but some fiddling with the video settings fixed it and then it came right up. She presently is reloading her other business onto her newly minted Win7 VM for that business, while I have been doing some work on her workstation from my workstation, setting it up and configuring backups.

Going forward, her service will continue to treat her Windows VMs as different computers that they support for her, and they'll do the Windows-type maintenance things - which will more or less protect her data even if the system itself can't be protected. And in the background, I'll have her Linux host configured to backup the complete VM environment by just copying the files. Also, of course, I will have an appropriate Linux backup mechanism in place to ensure the safety of that system too.

Next time a drive fails, recovery will be a routine, quick, and almost painless exercise.

[doktor5000]

Thanks for sharing