Anas Ismail Khan

Windows 8 comes with a built-in storage-pool feature, and Drive-Bender is a  ‘state of the art, single point storage pool technology’, and the upcoming PoolHD would be the “fastest and easiest way to create and maintain a storage pool of virtually infinite size.”

Now the question arises, what are these, so called, “Pools”? Well, before I answer that, let me explain what RAID Drives are, (though I’m no expert and to be honest, I myself didnt know anything about the two until a while ago.)

RAID, short for Redundant-Array-of-Independent-Disks, which bundles a group of hard-drives, in such a way that they function as a single _super-drive. _There are a few different kinds of RAID, each with its unique features and advantages.

A Storage-Pool, is similar to a RAID drive, or more like, a user-friendly-home-applicable _form of a RAID drive, that too brings multiple hard-drives or partitions together, so that they function as one _pooled-drive.

A common problem these days, which I myself have experienced, while installing Windows 8 CP, and PRO on my Dell INSPIRON N5110.

What actually happens is that, the initial part of the Windows Setup goes very well, and then the system goes down for reboot, at which, most people remove their installation media from the device. This is perfectly normal, and has nothing to do with what follows, i.e. It starts booting into Windows 8, and you can see the Win8 Logo, and the loading animation, which stays for a few seconds, and then fades away, leaving the screen all black,

Take a Look

Now you can actually “Test-Drive” the_ _Windows Phone.

When we download stuff using torrents, we first download a *.torrent file and run it with our bittorrent client. The torrent file contains information that leads to the download.

Magnet Links are such that, when clicked on, start your default torrent client and start off with the download immediately, without the *.torrent file.

It saves time(hardly a minute though), and well, wont clutter your disk with stupid files worth no more than a few KBs.

When i first installed Ubuntu inside a VirtualBoxVM on my laptop, i noticed that it didnt make proper use of the widescreen. The display was a small square box in the middle of the scree which kinda bothered me. To overcome this, just install the guest additions. To do so, press HOST + D. There you go. The auto-installer will take care of the rest.

Sit back and relax while the process completes, and then restart the VM.

Wine enables you to run Windows applications on Linux, Solaris, BSD, and MacOSX

Linux XP Desktop is a discontinued distribution of Linux which is based on Fedora, and bits of Red Hat.

The interface is based on the GNOME desktop, and, as the name suggests, has been designed to imitate the Windows XP environment (they haven’t exactly done a very clean job though, and is capable of running several windows applications using WINE.

The React OS project is an operating system written from scratch that follows the design and architecture of Windows NT. The idea behind it was to launch a free and open-source operating system that would enable windows programs and drivers to run on your PC.

Now, what you must be thinking is: “Why the hell would one want to go for such an OS when we already have got Windows?” Well, that’s cause ReactOS is free and open-source, means that you are free to customize it to suit your needs. It’s not just an alternative, but a free alternative to Microsoft Windows.

It’s pretty light actually. You can download it from the reactOS site, though i’d advise you to try it on a VM first, cause you might not find it as interesting as it sounds.

An error i faced while trying to install Linux XP 2006 on a VirtualBox VM. The error is known to have been faced while installing Red Hat too, and the reason behind it is that neither of the two OS support SATA hard-drives, i.e.  at least the older versions didn’t, so I just unmounted the HDD from the SATA controller, and mounted the same HDD on the IDE controller. To do so in VBox,

1. Power off the machine
2. Go to the machine’s settings>Storage
3. Right-Click on the HDD(under SATA in the storage tree), and click Remove attachment
4. Add a hard-disk to the IDE controller and in the box that pops up, click “choose existing disk” 
5. Now all you gotta do is browse to the HDD you just unmounted and select it.

That’s it. Start the VM, it ought to work fine now.