[Motorola Droid RAZR] Ohmster:
Oh yeah [MENTION=3315635]neoramasay[/MENTION] SSD drives in PCs are da bomb! When they came out, they were so expensive and limited capacity that no one could afford it. Now you can get a 250 Gb SSD for $100-120 or a 500 MB SSD for $190-225. Okay, that will not completely replace your 1,2, or 4 TB but most of that is storage. So you install the SSD, boot up with an Acronis True Image CD, clone your C drive to the SSD, shut down, unplug the mechanical hard drive, and boot up again to the SSD. It will now become the "Active" boot drive so you can then format the old one for storage. You go in your user folder and right copy/properties/location on each of your storage folders and relocate them to a newly created same name folder on the storage drive. I.e.: My Documents, My Pictures, My Music, and My Videos. This way you do not "Break Windows" and it all works seamlessly.

Before doing this, you right click C: drive in Computer, Properties, and check space used. Plug in a USB storage drive and copy then delete all of the storage on drive C. Move the above mentioned foldlers and then copy to USB drive and then delete them from drive C to get drive C down in size low enough to easily fit on the SSD with room to spare. Then do as instructed above, relocate all storage folders, and copy them back to the new storage drive. Neat trick and it works very well. Good idea to type "Disk Cleanup" into the Start/Search box, run it, and clean up Drive C first. I love this thing. Used to take over 5 minutes to boot my rig, well over 10 minutes to restart. I so hated those "Windows has finished installing updates. Reboot Now?" boxes because it would take so long that I just wouldn't do it. Not anymore! :D

I just helped Casper with this as he is an avid gamer and an SSD is probably the best and most universal improvement you can make to your PC as it benefits everyone, not just gamers. Casper didn't realize you could simply clone drive C instead of starting all over again so he never did it. [MENTION=1472623]d.casper.b[/MENTION] is enjoying it now, though. :laugh:

Getting Android apps to run well on a PC is just not going to happen. The OS and CPU are WAY too different than x86 or x64. The ARM processor is a RISC computer, I believe. None of the commands or processes are the same. So, you would need a virtual machine or emulator to even "try" to run this stuff and emulators and virtual machines suck, they are so slow because now you have another totally independent layer that every keystroke, mouse movement, frame of video, that must be duplicated twice to get through the layer. I tried this to run some Nintendo games on my PC like Super Mario Brothers because I worked as a tech and we finally got the contract to fix them. They were very poplular and were coming in in laundry baskets full of consoles, game packs, and controllers. I played Super Mario so many times I wanted to play again so I ran the emulator. Yeah, the game was there, the music was there, and it was fun, sort of. The controller does not map very well to a keyboard and mouse so the "jump or fall off" stuff was nearly impossible to get right. Fun but I got sick of it real quick.

Virtual Machines are cool because you really can run Apple OS, Linux, Windows XP, or anything you want in them. I did setup my Windows XP virtual machine (Comes in Windows 7 Pro) and yeah, it really works and yeah, it really is Windows XP. But I only did this to use Outlook Express email because it was the one and only TRUE HTML email client. If you could code in HTML and knew some scripting, your recipient would get email with real music streaming in, your own video playing right on the page, beautiful effects like snow falling, leaves blowing, water moving, and all sorts of neat stuff. Microsoft pulled the plug for good on Outlook Express because too many scumbags were exploiting the scripting ability to infect recipients computers. Too dangerous, never getting that back, ever again. Terrible shame, that was really fun and I joined a web group where we all practiced this and would show off our emails to each other, which you could save and use for your own use. There were weekly contests and you did not have to be a super brain to win, anyone could win, just follow the theme set for that weekend such as "Vacation" or something and you show off your skills by making cool vacation emails. You could always take cool code you saw, keep it in a text file, and then use that code to say, make snow fall on an email when you needed it. But an Android Virtual Machine? Never saw one but I am sure there are some. Just don't think it would work or would be so SLOW as to take all the fun out of it.

I would really, really love to play more with Virtual Machines and have VM Ware. But running a virtual machine is not fun and easy. You cannot just click an icon and start playing. These things take long to start up, get booted, and you have to share hardware to make them useful. For XP you would want to give at least 2GB of your system RAM to it, more if you can spare it as this RAM will not be available to your primary OS while running. Not to mention other hardware to share such as Ethernet connection, hard drives, cameras, any other hardware you might want to use. I actually downloaded Apple OS and was going to set it up on VM Ware but man, that was a hugh hassle and anytime I played with a MAC, the geek in me loved it but the practical person quickly got bored of it. Not useful for anything. Too time consuming, never did like one button mouse, and why am I doing this, to what practical end is there to running Apple OS on a PC? Unless there is some MAC program I really want to use, and then that would be slow, I cannot imagine. Perhaps for reading and writing MAC disks as they can't be read on a PC. I don't know if a VM could do it but maybe. I have a Linux machine, no need for that, and have an XP VM built into Windows 7. So what is the point of doing it?

Running Android on a VM or PC would be very interesting. I see that a Google Search on "can you run android os on virtual machines" reveals many possibilities. Here is a nice tutorial for using VirtualBox. That is a free VM and the tutorial comes from howtogeek.com and all of their tech articles are very, very good. They give links to the VirtualBox software and the Android-x86 ISO. Looks like they have Android 4.3, pretty nice but I would love to see Android 4.4.4. Still, it is something doable. If you do this and it runs, I would join you in this as that would be a *very cool* VM to play with! Let me know if you do this, if it works, how much hassle, and if it is fun or slow as hell. Thanks!

I am already downloading this Android-x86 4.3 20130725 live and installation iso because it is a Live CD, meaning you can boot to it and run Android right on your PC w/out installing anything or changing anything. If that works, might not need the extra weight of the CM, just use Android from the Live CD and now that sounds *very cool*! The Android ISO link way above shows all the iso files available. The URL here shows the latest x86 Live CD with install if you want it. This is way too cool to ignore, I have to try it!

I am not sure but you might have a better chance of finding a way to make Android apps run on a Linux machine as they are much more compatible. Just don't want to do the research for it now. Easy to make a dual boot PC that can do Windows or Linux. Or you can use a live boot CD to start up in Linux w/out altering your rig. There are tons of them out there and are very easy to use. Ubuntu is very popular and works "right out of the box" so you get a nice desktop, sound, Ethernet works, email and browser work, and it is so easy to do. I personally run a CentOS Linux box 24/7 for my web server and FTP client. Not too mention as a test server for website building on Apache web server. Plus lots of storage on it, map a network drive.

Nice talking to you buddy, have fun! :good: