A couple of times I had to press the hot key to free up my mouse, and send a power off signal to the virtual machine using the VirtualBox interface.I am so looking forward to that day, in the hope that itll mean an end to Microsofts intrusive little pop-up messages in the lower right corner of my monitor, and their increasingly devious attempts to trick me into accidentally upgrading.
Windowsxpmode_En-Us Or Windowsxpmode_N_En-Us Free Up MyWindowsxpmode_En-Us Or Windowsxpmode_N_En-Us Software Engineer RepeatedlyThe experience is a little like having a weeping software engineer repeatedly grip your lapels, shake you gently, and sob: But its cool. Its free. Why dont you want it For pitys sake, why Why I dont want it because it offers nothing I need or am even curious to see, while promising inconvenience and hassle during the upgrade process. When Microsoft are willing to pay me for the time Ill spend on their free upgrade, then maybe we can talk. But at present, Im much cheered to be running Windows XP again, which marked the last occasion I ever felt a new Microsoft operating system actually constituted an upgrade. The fact that you can run a virtual XP machine in a window under Windows 7, 8 or 10 is not as well known as it should be, and it has let me continue using some old software from that era that has resisted running in compatibility mode under later operating systems. Microsoft offered a Windows XP Mode for Windows 7, which could be installed and run under that operating system. The file is still available from the Microsoft Download Center (click on my link), and it contains a virtual hard drive with an XP installationso to get XP running under Windows 8, 8.1 or 10, all you have to do is retrieve that VHD. Since I wanted to run XP under Windows 8.1, I didnt run the exectuableI tucked it away in my Downloads folder. Embedded inside two layers of compression is the virtual hard drive I needed. I used 7-Zip to find and extract the necessary file. Windowsxpmode_En-Us Or Windowsxpmode_N_En-Us Archive Manipulation ProgramZip is a handy, open-source archive manipulation program, which adds a couple of options to the Windows menu you see when you right-click on a file. So I navigated to where Id stored WindowsXPModeen-us.exe, right clicked on the file, selected 7-Zip and then Open archive. Zip then gave me a view of the contents of the archive file, which includes a folder named sources. ![]() In the archive listing for xpm, theres a file called VirtualXPVHD. I right-clicked it, and then selected Copy to, telling 7-Zip to extract and decompress VirtualXPHD. Then I ran the program, told it I wanted to set up a new virtual XP machine using an existing virtual hard disk, and pointed it to the location of my VirtualXPVHD.vhd file. Welcome to VirtualBox. Now you I could launch an XP machine in a window on my Windows 8.1 desktop. New XP machine, ready to go. There are a couple worth knowing about if youre setting up your own virtual machine: 1) You can scale the window in which the XP machine runs, using the menu option ViewScale Factor. This is useful if you find yourself peering at a tiny window in the middle of your high resolution monitor. At first, youre going to need to let the XP window capture your mouse pointer. When you click inside the window, a dialogue box appears offering to capture the pointer. When you accept, you find your mouse is trapped inside the XP window. You can release it again by tapping a hot key, which defaults to the right control key on your keyboard. Its worth checking that you actually have a right control key before you fire up XP for the first time, otherwise your mouse will be permanently trapped. If you dont have one, you can change to a new hot key in the VirtualBox menu, FilePreferencesInputVirtual MachineHost Key Combination. ![]() I found the virtual machine was a bit crashy when XP was going through its initial set-up on my laptop (but not on my desktop).
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December 2020
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