RAM RAM RAM

Just upgraded the RAM in my Alienware Mx15, was 4GB now has 8GB of Kingston HyperX (PriceSpyNZ). This is because, a few times I had two VM's open and without thinking opened a third one....my system would then stop. All available RAM was used, so all processes were being swapped with the HDD.

Needless to say, but will anyway, if you are swapping all operations with the HDD even keyboard inputs are very very slow. In this situation I would just power down the laptop and restart, usually losing a little bit of work in the process.

More RAM doesn't make the computer faster....but it does stop it slowing down. I tested it yesterday with 6 VM's open, worked a treat. No noticeable slow down.

I was also testing Ubuntu 12.04 to see if it will be fit my usage. Installed Gnome Shell, Gnome classic looks pretty much like Gnome 2.x. Though in my brief testing I didn't find the setting to change the panels.

Using snapshots

Snapshots are a really useful feature of VM's, for me they are like a super restore point. They take your VM back to the exact way it was at the time of the snapshot. Recently I found this useful for downloading an update for a product that I use, it required me to install a stupid update manager to download the .exe file to update some software on my bosses Win7 host machine.

So rather then clutter the host machine I simply installed the update manager on a VM after taking a snapshot, downloaded the .exe file from the vendor and then restored the snapshot and un-ticking the option to take a snapshot of the current state. Since I had the .exe file that I wanted I installed it and went on with life without the update manager trying to clutter up the background processes of either the host or the VM.

There are some slightly more dodgy uses for the snapshot feature, I'm sure you can figure them out for yourselves.

Useful Networking Techniques

This is a really useful technique that I use all the time.

I have only tried this on my personal machine that runs Ubuntu 10.04 as the host system, I will give it a go on Win 7 when I get a chance.

I often connect my VM using a bridged connection through eth0 (wired connection), and connect my host machine to the internet through a separate wireless connection. This is super useful when I need to be connected to one network but also need to look up documentation on the net.

Or of course I want to access two networks on two different VM's but don't necessarily want those VM's to be aware of the other network.

To do this simply connect the host to the wired network, I usually set the network adapter on the VM to bridged so it gets its own IP address, once the VM can ping something in the wired network simply disconnect the host machine by opening the network settings and selecting disconnect. I always go and re-ping the thing I just pinged, must be out of some slight OCD but it always works. So at this point the only thing aware of the wired network is the VM connected to it.

I will then re-enable the wireless, access the internet as usual.

I find this really useful, YMMV, but it maybe useful to you also.