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virtual box questions-

Posted: Sat Mar 29, 2008 11:04 pm
by eeezzzeee
Hey guys-
I have been searching online for the past hour trying to find information about something I'm thinking about doing. I just wondered if anyone may have some answers for me since I haven't found exactly what I'm looking for.
I use Mint at home and totally dig it. I have a laptop that I bring to work with me to do my homework and stuff. My laptop has XP on it and because I unfortunately need XP for some school related things. I have tried to setup a dual boot on it before, but the lovely dell media direct button and partition have made that a living hell to try and accomplish for me, but i digress. Anyway I have been running a copy of slax off a USB drive so when I have some free time at work I can use a linux distro to work on learning programming and linux. This works well except my laptop gets REALLY hot using slax. When running my laptop under XP it stays cool all the time regardless of what im doing, but when I run slax it gets cookin. I tired looking up on google any things I could change to make it run cooler, but didn't find anything that solved my problem. So finally on to what my current idea is. I was thinking about using XP to host a virtual box and run mint inside the virtual box so I can continue learning about programming and linux using my laptop.
Here are a couple of questions I had-
Since virtualbox would basically be a program running in XP, will all my XP settings still be in effect? as in the power management settings and things like that, or would mint settings of things like power management take over while running? From what I can tell it should still be the XP power settings and management, which should still keep my laptop running cool, right? Would that also mean that my HD wouldn't have the spin down problem? Would I be able to connect mint to the internet from the virtualbox to get packages that I would need?
Thanks for any information or ideas you guys can give me on this.

Re: virtual box questions-

Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2008 12:24 am
by eeezzzeee
Thanks for the quick reply.
I am running a centrino duo processor and 2 gigs of ram, so I should be good to go there.
I just wanted to see if I could get some clarrification on one point you made- as far as the increased spin cycles on the hard drive, do you mean that it will still have the high load cycles that many people have complained about, or just more in general due to the programs use of the drive. I have read about really high load cycles on laptop harddrives from the power saving features. So would this problem still be a problem if the windows power saving features were in place, ie not spinning up the drive and stopping it repeatidly, or would it not matter becuase while the virtual drive was running the harddrive would still be controlled by linux.

*edited to add- I don't know slax is heating up my hardrive only, the whole bottom of the computer gets way hot. because im running it off of a usb drive I wouldn't think that it should be doing anything with the hardrive.

Re: virtual box questions-

Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2008 5:16 am
by eeezzzeee
I think I figured out why my computer ran so hot the other night... cause it happened tonight while I was running XP and its so simple I can't believe I didn't realize it the other night. My laptop battery gets really hot when I charge it, and while I was using slax the other night I was charging my laptop. :oops: I just assumed that it was the whole computer, not just the battery, sometimes I just have to shake my head in disbelief at how observant I am.

I have been doing tons of reading on that laptop harddrive issue, and unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any one solution, which is why I want to try the virtual box idea. I tried the USB thing as a way to use linux without killing my harddrive. I think I'll try load mint in a virtualbox and see what happens, I'm not too worried about the power settings as far as heat, I am just really worried about the harddive issue that is affecting linux laptop users, hopefully virutal box will be my solution.

Thank you for taking the time to help me, I really appreciate it.