Back in the days when Mozambique and Angola fought for independence from Portugal, the phrase A Luta Continua captured the imagination and attention of those of us who supported the anti-colonial movement. 'The Struggle Continues' came to mind Saturday afternoon after having spent two and a half days fighting with flakey memory chips while putting together a new machine. The project started when Will pointed out the ease with which Vmware allows one computer to run multiple simultaneous operating systems. My goal was to set up a machine which hosted several versions of windows and linux for software development and testing. Most of my work these days is split between Asp Dot Net with Visual Studio 2005, Dreamweaver for maintaing asp sites, and Delphi for my now legacy windows apps.
Microcenter had a special on Intel processors so I picked up a q9300 along with an asus P5Q SE motherboard. I already had a case and miscellaneous hard drives lying around so all I needed was memory. No problem.... Newegg had 4 gig of Corsair Dominator PC 8500 1066 on sale so I ordered 8 gig and while they were in transit, John put the other parts together using some 1 gig memo sticks I had laying around.
Everything was fine - I put xp pro and Ubunto 8.10 on the box and watched it fly. Pc Wizard 2008 ran up some incredible numbers. Really impressive. When the memory arrived I thought everything was going to be fine....
Think again. I popped all 4 sticks in, and the machine failed to boot. Whoa - my first thought was that the power supply could not handle the load so I pulled out two chips and booted up - things looked good. Windows kicked in and ran pretty good. Ubuntu on the other hand gave me all kinds of trouble. In the midst of figuring out what was going on I saw that xp was also freezing and throwing temper tantrums whenever it encountered a decent workload.
So after fiddling about with the bios more than I should have, I reinstalled xp and Linux on another drive - still no joy. I finally went to Microcenter, picked up 4 gig of generic memory on sale for $30 after rebate and bang, everything started running smoothly. Called New Egg and complained that only one of the four memory chips worked. They agreed to a refund. Let's see what happens.
So now that the hard part was over I could finally get down to business. I booted into Ubuntu, put both vmware workstation virtualbox on the linux side and created a xp virtual machines with each. I then installed vwd 2005 express in each of the virtual machines to see which ran best. The results were mixed. In general, there was not much of a difference between the speed of Virtualbox and VmWare. VmWare found my sound card, VirtualBox did not. VmWare seems smoother than VirtualBox, VirtualBox found all the keyboard keys and they work as expected. VirtualBox does not seem to handle windows resizing as well as VmWare.
The performance testsof Visual Web Developer vwd results were problematic in both virtual machines. Switching from source code view to design mode takes a long time in both environments as vs 2005 builds all the visual controls each time it switches to design view. I was concerned about this in the native xp environment and erroneously thought throwing more horsepower at the problem would fix it. But the performance of vwd 2005 in native xp on the new machine has been disappointing.
I downloaded and installed the vwd 2008 express and noticed that things are improved. Vwd 2008 seems to load the controls once and keep them in memory so the switch lag is gone. Now all seems well and I'm leased wth the setup.