th1bill
Jun 18th 2009, 09:15 PM
... As a no charge technician, the most common problem that I run into is folks will purchase Dell and other proprietary computers and loose their Restore Disks. Of course, the later the model, the less the problem is but with the older machines, the drivers might not be available from the manufacturer's web site and since I have no income I might have used all my free downloads, for the month, from Driver Guide.
... I just had a Dell where this was the case and the driver I needed miht not have been at Driver Guide anyway, so what to do. Any of you out there can do exactly what I did for the lady in my Church Family. I installed Ubuntu, available, free, at ubuntu.com. To further accommodate the transition for her I went to Sun's www.virtualbox.org (http://www.virtualbow.org) and chose to download the free version that matched the operating system and then chose to install it instead of downloading. I chose the version distributed by Sun Micro because of it's USB support and cutting edge technoligy.
... When the install was completed I clicked on Applicatios>System Tool>Sun VirtualBox. Her I Clickedon the New button and created a virtual machine named WinXP. I chose to create a ten gig, expanding, harddrive, chose to give the video 32meg of system memory. When I finished the VirtualBox screen presented me with the ability to use it. Before I did that I looked at the divices listed in the right/lower window area and clicked on CD ROM. In the new window put the checkmark in to enable it and chose the drive of my preference and cosed the window. If your machne syl has a floppy ad you plan to use it, do the same for the internal drive only.
... I then inserted the Windows disk into the drive and with the WinXP virtual machine highlighted I clicked the Start Arrow button and installed Windows. Since the Windows operating system is the Guest System it uses the drivers installed by the Host System, in this case, Ubuntu, and does not require the install of hard to find drivers or the install of new hardware to overcome the problem.
... Can this be performe successfully by a non-techno nerd? Yes, the most difficult part of this operation is the installatin of the Windows, everything else is very straight forward.
... I just had a Dell where this was the case and the driver I needed miht not have been at Driver Guide anyway, so what to do. Any of you out there can do exactly what I did for the lady in my Church Family. I installed Ubuntu, available, free, at ubuntu.com. To further accommodate the transition for her I went to Sun's www.virtualbox.org (http://www.virtualbow.org) and chose to download the free version that matched the operating system and then chose to install it instead of downloading. I chose the version distributed by Sun Micro because of it's USB support and cutting edge technoligy.
... When the install was completed I clicked on Applicatios>System Tool>Sun VirtualBox. Her I Clickedon the New button and created a virtual machine named WinXP. I chose to create a ten gig, expanding, harddrive, chose to give the video 32meg of system memory. When I finished the VirtualBox screen presented me with the ability to use it. Before I did that I looked at the divices listed in the right/lower window area and clicked on CD ROM. In the new window put the checkmark in to enable it and chose the drive of my preference and cosed the window. If your machne syl has a floppy ad you plan to use it, do the same for the internal drive only.
... I then inserted the Windows disk into the drive and with the WinXP virtual machine highlighted I clicked the Start Arrow button and installed Windows. Since the Windows operating system is the Guest System it uses the drivers installed by the Host System, in this case, Ubuntu, and does not require the install of hard to find drivers or the install of new hardware to overcome the problem.
... Can this be performe successfully by a non-techno nerd? Yes, the most difficult part of this operation is the installatin of the Windows, everything else is very straight forward.