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So long story short, got wife into gaming with release of D3(which turned out to be one of the worst games to get her hooked on the idea of games imo) and shes been begging me for her own rig because she can only play with a wireless mouse/keyboard on a 42" TV and HTPC(Oh the pity /roll eyes running at 1080p with full surround sound except you have to sit on a couch)
Now, even pricing things around I found that even just to build something to replace my HTPC(was my old gaming rig so it's pretty BA for its time and still runs most modern games on medium settings like a boss) would cost me 300-400$, so I was looking into this thread, Soft Xpand - 2 computers in one, and for 50 bucks seemed like a cool idea, however I installed it(albeit I didn't do everything their guide recommended too before I did it) and it borked my PC so hard I had to reinstall windows from my back up images.
However, I found that VMplayer finally got I/O rerouting and allowed you to use two separate keyboards on the same machine. After many hours this morning installing everything and moving furniture around, I finally got it to work. As I type this my wife is using hey keyboard/mouse/new monitor with a VM and is happily playing Diablo 3, while I'm surfing TL and watching stuff on my laptop =D. We can finally play games together(Although to anyone doing this that has dual monitors, you'll have disable one sometimes for the heavier graphics games).
I may edit this later with a picture of my success, but I'm just so happy it's all working so well. She's able to play her D3 and WoW now while I can play Starcraft and not feel bad her back was hurting lol.
  
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Yes! I haven't used them for that purpose, but I do almost everything in many virtual machines. In fact I have had the same Win7-64 install for years and it still feels like new because I have almost nothing installed on it except audio drivers, video drivers, and Virtual Box. I have some set up just how I like it for various forms of development, and one for digital painting. I even have one for guests to use if they need to do something online while they're here, so they can't mess anything up. It's like they're not even using my computer. Of course they don't realize it's a virtual machine, so it's funny when they think I'm actually still using Windows XP.
Best of all, I can throw any of them on a flash drive and plug it into my laptop to take anywhere, and then just transfer it back to my desktop when I get back, and it's like I was using the same computer the whole time. They make it so easy to back up entire installs as well. I have several templates that I just duplicate when I need another one. For example, a new development VM for some new language I'm trying out. It already has all of my development environments set up fresh just how I like them, and there's no worry about messing up what I already have in other VMs.
It's so nice to be able to save snapshots as well, for endless reasons.
Virtual machines forever.
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EPT
