Next General Meeting:
Meeting Preview—Virtual Machines for Backward Compatibility – How to Run Your Old OS and Applications on a VM
Date: Tuesday, October 1, 7 p.m.
Location: Danbury Hospital Auditorium
Directions

By Jim Scheef

Do you love your Windows XP? It was easily the best version of Windows up to that point and the service packs made it ever more secure and stable. So even though it’s now ten years old, you plan to never give it up; to stay with XP for as long as you possibly can. Hopefully forever!

But time and hardware move on. As various parts become unstable, eventually your hardware may become the limiting factor when, for example, the power supply in your Dell or HP machine fails and you find that the parts you need have become “unobtainium” – something so rare that prices have sky rocketed to unrealistic levels on eBay. To add insult to injury, new hardware no longer comes with XP drivers, so installing XP directly on a new machine becomes impossible. What to do? Oh my, oh my! What to do!? As bleak as this scenario might seem, there is another path – something that allows you to have your cake and eat it too! The answer is the subject of our October General Meeting presentation by Bruce Preston, DACS Secretary and Board Member.

Would you be interested in free software that you can install on new (or merely recent) hardware that will allow you to run Windows XP well into the foreseeable future? The software Bruce will demonstrate is called VirtualBox. First Bruce will explain what virtual technology is all about and then show you how VirtualBox allows you to run one or more guest operating systems on a single machine. Then he will demonstrate how to create a virtual machine and install Windows on that VM. Along the way, you will learn what is required to install and run VirtualBox in terms of host machine hardware and the host operating system. There are many variables but the basic concept is actually pretty simple: boot your new machine to whatever OS came preinstalled, then start an application that allows you to run the OS you really like, or the one you happen to need for the moment to run an old application. Or start up DOS so you can have a fast game of the original Quake that you haven’t been able to run since your old game machine died during the Clinton administration. Whatever your reason, Bruce will help you have your cake, easy as pie.

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DACS meetings are usually held at the Danbury Hospital auditorium. (Click here for directions and parking information.)

Doors open at 6:30 p.m. for registration and casual networking. The meeting starts at 7:00 p.m. with a question and answer period (Ask DACS), followed by announcements and a short break. The featured evening presentation begins at 8:00. The meeting is scheduled to adjourn at 9:30 p.m.

DACS General Meetings are free and open to the public. Members and prior attendees are encouraged to extend invitations to anyone interested in this topic.

Danbury Area Computer Society (DACS) is a registered nonprofit and has been serving the region since 1990.