Two or more distinct operating systems (OSs) are loaded simultaneously and run on an x86 computer system. Each OS is booted serially and in such a way that the OS resides in a separate memory footprint than the other OSs by partitioning the memory map. The partition of the memory map includes a low memory region, dedicated memory partitions for storing each OS, and dedicated regions for storing shadows of the low memory region and the ACPI for each OS. Switching between the two or more resident OSs is performed by sleeping the current OS and then resuming the desired OS using the shadow previously stored for the desired OS. None of the resident OSs require any modification in order to run in this fashion.