Re: Geek blowing smoke? (dual-boot advice)

Moe Trin wrote:
On Fri, 18 May 2007, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.linux.setup, in article
<4Lk3i.11990$j63.2982@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Jack Crenshaw wrote:


Last night I talked to a "Geeks on Call" guy about helping me with the
setup. In part, I was fishing for advice, whether to go the PM or
VmWare route.


What city - what franchise? I knew these guys were "certified experts"
(which means they passed someone's test by remembering the stuff they
were taught to pass the certification test - which means virtually
nothing about real situations), but I had no idea they were _that_
clueless.

I'd love to tell you, but I hate to make that many waves. This guy was apparently still in training, so I think it likely that he was still pretty clueless. I'd hate to extrapolate that to the entire company.


1) Can use VmWare, no problem. But I'd need _LOTS_ of RAM; 2Gb as a
minimum, 4 Gb preferred. Also, he says it slows down the execution of
everything.


Did you go to the web site?
http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/intro_hostreq_ws.html says

Memory
128 MB minimum (256 MB recommended)
You must have enough memory to run the host operating system, plus the
memory required for each guest operating system and for applications on
the host and guest. See your guest operating system and application
documentation for their memory requirements.

Ok, so he was wrong about that, too.


2) He says dual boot "is not recommended." He says modern versions of
Linux read from and write to the MBR quite heavily.


The MBR is written to when installing. Only.


Using the system in a dual-boot way makes it unstable.


The only thing that is unstable is the displayed clock times if you
don't tell *nix that the BIOS clock is set to localtime because windoze
is a single user system trying to act as if it has heard that the world
is round, but is quite sure that story is propaganda from the commies or
somethin'.


3) He didn't seem to have heard of PM or Boot Magic (which replaces>
System Commander) at all. He said that you'd have to use a Linux utility
(Grub?) to manage it.


Yeah, PM and Boot Magic weren't on the notes he used to "pass" his
certification test. What else is new?


4) He recommended against dual-boot entirely. When I told him that's
what I wanted, he refused to do it.


Hopefully, you didn't have to pay this @$$h0le for his mis-information.
Five strikes out of four - he's out.


Color me confused. I suspect that this guy is a Linux geek who neither
knows nor likes much about Windows (I'm now using XP Pro, BTW).


No, he's a MSCE-wannabe who lacks the knowledge to pass the microsoft
tests, and is faking it as best he can.


My question to the group: Is this guy in the know, or just blowing
smoke? Any advice?


You can''t say that he is lying - because that implies that he should
know the real answer, and is intentionally telling you something else.
No - this guy is just another example if the brain-dead technical support
types that are out there ripping off consumers. He's not even worth
giving a free CD with any of several hundred available Linux distros.
It wasn't on the cheat sheet he used to pass his certification, so it
must not exist.

What's really sad is that all of these questions can be answered in a
few seconds search at google. I guess that's another item he's never
heard of.

Move along - there is nothing to be found there, unless you are looking
for new lows on the scale of intelligence.

Old guy
.

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