Others may (or may not) be interested in my experience in setting up a Microsoft Virtual Machine for Windows ME on my old Pentium 4 1.80GHz XP-Home machine. Actually it all went remarkably smoothly – luckily my old machine has plenty of disk space, and I had already upgraded to 1GB memory. At first I had some difficulty in setting up three logical disk drives to match the host, but after I found that they must be created BEFORE installing the guest OS (at least with ME; since XP has ability to mount volumes, this might not be needed with that guest OS). I also allocated 512MB memory to the ME virtual machine, considerably in excess of the 64MB recommended, assuming the PageMaker would work better with this.
After installing the ME OS to the virtual machine (just the same as for any computer), I then installed all the upgrades. I then installed and updated Office 2000, again very smoothly, To match the locations of the templates on the XP host, I set up a C:Documents and SettingsApplication DataMicrosoftTemplates folder for the templates, and set up Word to use this.
I then installed PageMaker plus Acrobat 6. For the first time I can remember, this worked first time out of the box, without any of the normal frustrations. DDE from PowerPoint 2000 to PageMaker works fine (doesn’t from PowerPoint 2007), and I can also import Word files direct into PageMaker without having to save as Word 6/95 format.
I have just tried making a PageMaker book of almost 30 modules, 189 pages, mostly PowerPoint images. This progressed smoothly, if slowly – I’d guess it took about three times as long as on the XP host. But this was still acceptable, and the result was fine.
I was happily surprised to find that the virtual machine can communicate very easily with the host, including by LAN, since both appear as separate nodes. But it is also possible to drag-and-drop from one to the other, and to map a host folder to a guest drive.
My next job is to uninstall Office 2007 and then Office 2000 from the host (they do not co-exist well), then re-install Office 2007 (hopefully I won’t have lost all my settings).
Based on this initial experience, I would not hesitate to recommend the (free) Microsoft Virtual Machine as a solution for running orphan software. It seems to offer significant advantages compared with dual-booting. When I upgrade to a Windows 7 box, I’ll certainly plan to install an XP-Home virtual machine and continue to run PageMaker, rather than spending a fortune to upgrade this to InDesign, a program which is much too sophisticated for my needs (and wallet).
Chris
