A few days ago, i decided to shelve all forms of multibooting of Operating systems on my laptop and embraced Virtualization fully.

For the sake of the noobs in the house, Multi-boot or Multi-booting is the installation of multiple operating systems on different partitions of a computer, with the ability to choose which one to boot when starting the computer.

Virtualization, on the other hand, is the hosting of multiple virtualized Operating System environments within a single OS instance.

Either of these methods is good and one is not necessarily better than the other but — as is often the case — what matters is the method that is better for your particular needs.

So, what informed my switch to Virtualization option? And even more importantly, why would anyone ever want to run multiple operating systems on a computer?

Before i delve into this, it might help if i highlight the Pros and Cons of each of these options as highlighted in the table below:

[ws_table id=”2″]

I do a lot of OS testing, sampling out the various Linux distributions being churned out almost on a daily basis. I also do a lot of work on virtualized networks, creating a network of virtual computers within my computer. So, it was really a no brainer why i had to switch to Virtualization instead of multi booting.

To do this, i had to shell out N5000 (US$30) for an additional 4GB RAM to upgrade my laptop to 8GB. That way, my guest OS would have enough resources to work with.