Food is Memory

Computer literate people will know that there are many different levels of computer memory -- more than just RAM and hard drives. As I was preparing my after-dinner snack (delicious Churros cereal), I thought that the food that I eat and have in my apartment is highly analogous to memory in a computer. I will succinctly explain the analogy from fastest to slowest memory.

Registers - Chewed food, ready for consumption
L1 Cache - Food in mouth
L2 Cache - Food in spoon
GPU - Food in bowl (Either eaten one spoonful at a time or gulping it down(parallel processing))
RAM - Food in box
Flash - Food in my room
Solid-state drive (SSD) - Food in the pantry
Hard drive - Food at the grocery store
Tape - Wherever food is before the stores
Cloud - Food that is still on the farm


~ Simply Advanced ~

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Windows 8 on a Mac

When people want Windows OS on a Mac they may think of dual booting or using a program like VMWare, VirtualBox, BootCamp, or Parallels to run the two simultaneously.

But, my roommate (Spence) and I experimented with another method to run Windows 7 and 8 on a Mac. We would replace the Mac's harddrive with the harddrive running Windows OS. Both were 2.5 inch.

What got us thinking on this track was that, first of all, the Mac wouldn't boot after being dropped. Us being computer savvy individuals, we didn't have another Mac lying around, but we did have an older Lenovo laptop that we thought we could possibly salvage parts from.

We took out the Mac harddrive, took out the Lenovo harddrive with Windows 7 and 8 dual booted, and swapped them. The process took less than ten minutes to figure out and complete.

The results?
Windows 8 runs beautifully on a 2009 aluminum uni-body Mac. Both Modern UI and desktop versions supported. And we were surprised that the Wi-Fi was easily connected to without installing any additional drivers.

The problems?
Initially, the trackpad only partially works (movement only, no clicking), but an external mouse does work flawlessly. Clicking and multitouch were added by installing the proper drivers for them. There may be a few more issues, but this is just a preliminary rundown of our experimental harddrive organ transplant.

If you also do a harddrive transplant, let us know! You can download some of Apple's drivers [at your own risk] from http://www.2shared.com/complete/J5_Inbmt/Apple_folder_from_Boot_Camp_Wi.html.

~ Simply Advanced ~

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My Android Apps | My Windows Phone Apps | My Computer/Programming Blog