Do you have Windows 7 with Aero running in 1920x1080 mode?

g00ey

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Aug 15, 2009
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If you have, I would like to have a screenshot of your desktop with the picture below as a desktop background. Your help will be much appreciated and I'll give you credit wherever I submit your screenshot on forums (unless you object of course).

I have no commercial interest in this, I'm just a regular user who wants to make the world a better place. My intention is to promote virtualization technology and demonstrate graphically how you can run several operating systems on the same machine at the very same time.

Here are the instructions:

1. Make sure that your screen mode truly is 1920x1080, (I don't want to have the wallpaper rescaled in the screen shot). Make the following picture temporarily your desktop wallpaper:

project1pe.png


2. Open a window and arrange it as the black rectangle in green in the following picture:

arrangement1f.jpg


This window could be paint, notepad or any software that opens a standard windows 7 window with Aero translucency. I want this window to look like a typical hardware demanding FPS game (such as Crysis 2 och Battlefield 3 or similar) running in windowed mode in Windows 7.

3. Make sure there are no desktop icons covering the green shaded parts of the image above and make sure that the window you have added is active. Press "SHIFT + PrintScreen" to capture the screen.

4. Open Windows Paint or similar software and paste the screenshot by pressing "CTRL-v".

5. Save the picture as 24-bit PNG, BMP or TIFF (NOT JPEG or any image format below 24-bit!), and submit it as is back onto these forums. You can upload it to e.g. "imageshack.us" but make sure you set the "Do not resize" (!) option.

If I had Windows 7 or the hardware to run it I would do this myself but I currently don't so your help will be much appreciated.
 

g00ey

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Aug 15, 2009
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The reason why I chose Win7 is because it is something that many people recognize and yet it is fairly modern, but I suppose I could use Win8 in its stead. Unfortunately my hardware that is about 7 years old doesn't run Win7 or 8 well. I have found a computer with Windows 7 and here's the end result that I wanted:

multiplatform1.png


This is intended as the following question in an OsX vs Win vs Linux debate: "Why choose?". I want to encourage support for virtualization functionality that enables the possibility for virtual machines to run directly on hardware other than the CPU (aka IOMMU or Intel VT-d). For example, I may want to run Windows on-the-metal while running a virtual Solaris/OpenIndiana machine directly on a hard disk controller. That way I can use ZFS which currently is the best filesystem in the world when it comes to protecting against data corruption and full protection cannot be achieved unless it is run directly on the hardware. Data corruption or silent data corruption is a growing concern as time has shown that newer and denser hard drives are considerably more sensitive to data corruption than old drives and more prone to failure. The silence aspect of the corruption is that most data is lost unnoticed by the user or the operating system. Research has clearly shown that filesystems such as NTFS, FAT<x>, HFS etc does not give sufficient protection even on top of a hardware RAID.

In another setup I might want to run Linux on-the-metal but still be able to run Win7 or Win8 as a virtual machine playing DirectX games, which is only possible if the virtual machine runs directly on the GPU or by a technology that I want to encourage hardware developers to develop:

I'm pushing for virtual extensions that make it possible to share the GPU between the host OS and several virtual machines just as smoothly and seamlessly as the CPU can be shared by using Intel VT-x or AMD-v extensions. Also virtual machines should be able to share the computer screen just as windowed video streams can be shared with the desktop. Features such as extended alpha channels and other translucency effects for blending the screen outputs from different machines is a plus.

From a commercial standpoint this is a good thing because Windows users will be able to use Linux and OsX without leaving Windows and staunch Linux supporters can enjoy the full features of Windows while still using Linux as a default platform. As it is now, people who have left Windows entirely won't be easy to get back to Windows, with virtualization with all the features I mentioned this will change.