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 of another one exception uh 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 realworld 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 okay lonus 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 32bit version of Windows in a virtual
machine and play to your heart's content cool right VMS 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 your
gaming rig and turn one beastly PC into
to three virtual machines a Naas and
then two 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 tear down guides
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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 tequi 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
disliked it do the other thing check out our other channels as well we've got
some great videos over on Channel Super Fun like hot dog 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
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I've said as always a few times here don't forget to subscribe and follow and
all that good stuff