Four In One

I've been struggling with an old desktop computer for years now. I'm too frugal to buy a Mac, although they are very tempting. So last week I plunked down several hundred dollars on an HP desktop with a 64-bit AMD quad-core processor, 4 gigs of RAM and a terabyte drive. I bought a new copy of Windows 7 and an ebay copy of Windows XP. I already had an OEM (bootable) copy of Windows 2000 Pro. I have some old home movies that I want to edit using Adobe Premiere on Win2K, a legacy scanner that works under WinXP, and I wanted to run iTunes on Windows 7.

So I installed Ubuntu Linux 10.10 as the base OS and repartitioned the disk. Ubuntu is free, but I paid $10 for a set of commercial install disks. Then Oracle's VirtualBox (also free) and then the three windows OSes on top of that. Total time spent was about four hours.

On the bottom is Ubuntu, running Firefox. Next is Win2K running Adobe Acrobat Reader. Next is WindowsXP, running Internet Explorer. And on the top is Windows 7, running iTunes. All running on the same computer at the same time. They can share files, network connections, CDs and DVDs and USB ports. And even cut and paste between applications.

I have no idea how this works.