Gadgetory

as much as many of us would like to escape our mundane lives for something a little more fantastical the concept of virtual reality is still a little ways away from completely fooling our brains into thinking we're actually in middle-earth or whatever but for your computer it's pretty simple to fool it into thinking that a fake virtual environment is the real deal I'm talking of course about virtualization which has become a really useful tool for home users and IT pros alike but what the heck is it well in a general sense it means putting layers of software between your computer's hardware and some other software that you're trying to run but more commonly it means running one operating system on top of another one on top of another one on top another inception ah no usually it's one layer and then more operating systems so you've probably seen this in the form of running one version of Windows as a virtual machine or a VM inside a window in a newer version this has all sorts of real-world applications but before we get into this it helps to understand something about how your computer achieves this you see your computer grants different pieces of software different privileges depending on what they are your operating system has a lot more privileges than regular programs like being able to directly access hardware like your memory or your CPU the idea being to stop malicious applications from attacking your system or crashing it because of this early virtualization software that was forced to run as a regular program without privileged access to Hardware directly had to translate the actual instruction set of the processor which you can learn about here by the way so that the virtual OS could actually make any use of it or as an alternative you can install a small program called a hypervisor as the main OS on the computer then virtualize your main OS like Linux or Windows or whatever else on top of that to actually run programs but because of the overhead involved with translating instructions this resulted in some serious slowdowns in terms of performance but in the mid-2000s both AMD and Intel started making processors that natively supported virtual machines allowing a hypervisor to run below the layer where an OS would usually be which means that the system wouldn't have to spend time translating instructions enabling much faster near native performance ok Linus so that's a lot of technical talk about hypervisors and layers and onions or whatever else but what does that mean for me can I actually use this stuff well yeah actually if you have older games you still love that just won't play nicely on your modern 64-bit operating system you can run an old 32-bit version of Windows in a virtual machine and play to your heart's content cool right vans are also useful for testing new software or even like a website that you're not sure whether it contains malware or not because you can just delete the entire virtual machine without touching any of the important data on your main OS or even your network if you quarantine it effectively and speaking of your main operating system if you're thinking about switching to something else completely different you can actually try your new OS in a virtual machine without nuking your existing hard drive and your existing OS not to mention compatibility between operating systems remember parallels that I mentioned before Windows applications on the Mac that's right and if you have important data that you can't lose VMS are also a very easy way to back up most vm software can take snapshots of the entire virtual system at a given point in time kind of like an uber System Restore this capability has made it very popular on servers which often need redundancy and backups to ensure constant operation not to mention the fact that running multiple virtual machines on one server can put all of that processing power to better use as modern server hardware is notoriously underutilized especially if the workloads don't natively take advantage of many processing threads at a time but if you want to do something really cool you can virtualize is your gaming rig and turn one beastly PC into three virtual machines an ass and then to gaming boxes that two players can use at once so you can check out this video for a practical demonstration of how it's done and the results speaking of practical you know what's practical ifixit.com the world's free online repair manual they've got step-by-step repair and teardown guides for all kinds of stuff like seriously we've got like fifteen thousand plus guides for iphones ipads macs computers android phones tablets you pretty much name it and it's totally free with no ads or annoying login portals or anything like that what supports this business you might ask great question well they've also got a line of the tools and that you need in order to perform these repairs that you can buy over on ifixit.com so they've got that fantastic screwdriver kit that I use all the time they've also got their larger protec bag that has the tool kit along with like the magnetic screw holder and all that kind of stuff in it and all you got to do to check it out is head over to ifixit.com slash tech quickie to a learn how to repair your devices and get all the tools you need which by the way come with a lifetime warranty so thanks for watching guys if you like this video do that thing if you just liked it do the other thing check out our other channels as well we've got some great videos over on channel super-fun like hotdogs Olympics whatever that is see you're curious now right you got to check it out as always if you leave a comment below we'll try and check that out and see if we can make a fast as possible episode with your suggestion and as always I think I said as always a few times here don't forget to subscribe and follow and all that good stuff