XPost: comp.os.ms-windows.misc, alt.windows7.general, microsoft.
ublic.windowsxp.general
From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net
On Sun, 19 Nov 2023 13:59:56 +0000, Java Jive
wrote:
>On 17/11/2023 13:02, Steve Hayes wrote:
>>
>> Someone stole my laptop computer, and I'm beginning to be concerned
>> that it may be irreplaceable.
>>
>> It was running Windows 7, 32-bit, and it seems that most, if not all,
>> laptops sold nowadays with Windows installed are 64-bit, which means
>> they won't run a lot of my software, and that means that they won't
>> allow me to access a lot of the research data I have collected over
>> the last 30 years.
>>
>> People have told me that it is possible to run a virtual machine on a
>> Win 64-bit computer that will emulate a 32-bit OS, but before I spend
>> money on a computer that might not work for me, I'd like to hear from
>> someone who has had experience in running such things, to find out how
>> well they work.
>I'm late into this discussion, but from a skim through just now, I don't
>think the following has been asked:
>
>Have you any disk-image style back-up of your previous system that was
>stolen - eg an image made by Ghost, Clonezilla, etc?
>
>If you have, using that as the source to make a working Virtual Machine
>(VM, and I'm using the term generically rather than implying any brand)
>should be easier than trying to re-install your original system and all
>its software from scratch, even supposing that you actually have every
>single installation media involved and that they all still work.
Yes, I do have a couple of Acronis backups. I'll try to keep them in
case I ever do have to try to install them on a vitrual machine.
>
>Anyone else here tried to use 20-year old floppies recently? No, I
>thought not, most won't even have access to a floppy drive any more! I
>can't remember details now, but a few months ago I was trying to create
>a W98 boot USB stick for running imaging software, and for some obscure
>reason now forgotten needed to perform a 'sys' command to do it, and
>*none* of the many W98 boot floppies I had still worked! Eventually I
>found just one floppy disk that still worked well enough to allow an old
>floppy boot image to be written to it, so that I could boot from it and
>run the 'sys' command.
When I got a Win 98 machine back in 1999 I copied all the floppies and
stiffies I could find to a CD-ROM, and I think I have a copy of that
in a directory on the hard drive of my XP machine!
Oh, and the 2nd-hand Win 10 32-bit machine I goes (see earlier
messages) *does* have a DVD drive, which my wife's Windows 11 machine
doesn't have, so that's a big plus. Om the other hand, it doesn't have
a card slot, so getting photos off my camera will be a bit of a
schlep.
>
>Home-made CDs & DVDs tend to degrade over time too.
>
>Some of your other questions seem to have been answered, but
>particularly I can confirm that through the VM you can access USB and
>network hardware, etc, and areas of the host hard disk outside of the
>VM, though you may have to alter some settings from their defaults to do
>so. However, I only ever used a VM to test my website on old browsers,
>which is hardly going to test the sort of functionality that you need,
>so I'll stop around here.
>
>Note Paul's point though, that if you want to use the in-built Microsoft
>VM functionality, you need to be running a Pro version of W10 or W11,
>not a Home version.
--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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