Link 3 laptops toegether to make one pc using a vm?

Zswizzy

Zswizzy

Zswizzy

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Ok not sure if this is the right forum or not but move it if need be.

I own 3 laptops, All bought from a school for £25 as they were upgrading so naturally they are pretty terrible, If I can remember correct they have pentum 4, 2gb of ram and a 40gb HDD.
They work, Just about, For daily tasks but cant do anything more than having one browser window with 2 or 3 tabs open before it really starts to struggle.

So why im doing this?
Because I was in idiot and I got a case with big blue fans, Which I cant turn the lights off so I don't like leaving torrents and downloads going on overnight, Also the wireless sucks for now, So It gets sub par download speeds since I cant have a cable trailing all over my house at night but I could leave a stack of laptops right next to my router.

So I have asked my friend and he says it should be entirely possible, Since Its pretty similar to a server stack running one vm to get the power from the entire stack.

So I would like so of your guys help.
1. What os should I put on the laptops
2. How do I got about getting the vm to run across all 3 laptops
3. How do I get it to work simply!

Thanks for any help.

Also I know none of the above may make any sense to anyone but me, Im dyslexic and I try :D

(Also Im an aspiring Network admin currently studying in college so I figured this would be pretty useful too.
 
What you're proposing to do isn't going to be simple, and to be blunt it's probably not worth the hassle of attempting. There was a Linux distro called ClusterKnoppix that would have done something along the lines of what you want, but it's no longer maintained.
 
That hardware should have no trouble with a clean install of XP Pro for downloading. I'm sure we've got a few machines on people's desktops with less power than that. There are guides on how to remove all the non-essential services to speed things up.

You could look at Linux. Ubuntu is easy to try from a CD or a USB stick.

I'm guessing the bigger issue is going to be storage. A USB hard drive would be the cheapest way out of that, or maybe a USB hub with a load of 32GB USB sticks in! Better still a NAS drive.
 
I dont think what your after is actually possible? I mean there is load balancing across multiple clusters, but it doesnt as far as i know actually share the hardware resources of all 4 machines into the 1 VM.
 
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