CathodeRayDude (via J. B. Crawford):
I wrote about Phoenix Hyperspace a few days ago. I have finally obtained one of the very, very, very few machines that shipped with it, and it turns out the way it works is even more batshit nuts than I’d read.
[…]
Dual and Hybrid are both straightforward ideas. A hypervisor is clumsy and overkill, but not really that strange a solution. The other one is just a normal Linux with a shortcut in Windows that reboots and selects the other partition, like we had in 1997. Yawn.
It didn’t take me long, however, to figure out that Dual Resume was clearly up to some wretched tricks, and as I looked into it it just got stranger and stranger.
What a great write-up on a series of wonderful, concerning hacks that Phoenix put together to quickly switch between Windows and their Hyperspace OS. Fragile, yes, but I can’t help but admire it too. Although read-write access to the Windows partition definitely falls more on the “concerning” side of things.
I had all but forgotten that span of time when netbook makers had a “fast-booting” OS installed alongside Windows. It seems they didn’t boot so fast after all. I vaguely remember wanting to get Splashtop running on my own machine.