Replies

As I believe you found out, Chuck, OfficeTab is a prime culprit for this behavior. They keep on maintaining that they have solved the problem, but what they do is to have the install uncheck the “Prompt be changing…” box. I think they got so fed up of complaints that they recently removed the users’ forum from their web site.

Chris

I have now copied the VM with the XP guest to another computer, with a Win7 host. It runs just the same as on the original XP-host machine on which it was first installed. When I first ran the copied version, it did not ask me for a new key, nor did it try/fail to activate. Although as stated this is in breach of the EULA, my defense would be that I do have another unused copy of XP, but have no simple way to install it. Further, as noted, if I did not have this spare copy of XP, how would I go about getting (or paying for) another copy from M$?

It does seem that M$ has perhaps lost interest in this. I had assumed that when I activated the old copy of XP on the original VM, I would at least have to phone M$ to approve, given that it was originally installed on a very different machine – can’t get much more different than a VM on a dual-core desktop and an ancient Pentium-based laptop (since retired). But no. the activation was immediate with no questions asked…

Chris

Although the HowToGeek article maintains that default workgroup name is Workgroup, in my experience this is not true for Windows XP, for which the default is MSHOME. This was the problem in my case.

Problem is on an existing network, there are many machines using MSHOME, so in such a case you need to decide whether to change all the existing machines, or just the new machines (and any that follow!).

Not sure why this change was made, but it’s a real pain for backward compatibility!

Chris

I wonder whether this is a function of the version of Word 2000 you have. I have Office 2000 Professional SR-1 and have had no difficulty re-installing and updating on several occasions. You specifically refer to Word: I wonder if some of the updates you are attempting to install are for elements of Office 2000 other than Word, for example for Outlook?

Do you have Office 2000 Service Pack 3 (SP3). If you have installed SR-1, this includes all updates released since Office 2000 SR1. I have a PDF of the M$ web page (now no longer available) that describes the SP3 update and how to install. I can E-mail it to you if you wish.

Hope this helps.

Chris

Frustrated! Tried to set this up on three occasions on two different 1GB USB flash drives that I had just re-formattted with Windows. Neither was password protected. On each occasion, after downloading 200+MB (luckily I was not paying for bandwidth!), I was informed that the program could not format the drives. No useful error information was provided. The help page is equally uninformative.

Woody tells me that special USB flash drives are not needed. So I remain confused and frustrated!

Chris

I have been running the Windows VM on a dual core 2.8GHz Windows XP SP3 desktop with 2GB RAM for some time. I run Window ME (sic) in the VM. I use this VM to update a training manual that requires interaction between Office 2000 and PageMaker. I must use PowerPoint 2000 because PowerPoint 2007 will not link the slides correctly to the PageMaker file. I find running both Office 2000 and Office 2007 together under XP gives rise to problems, so this is the best solution. I suppose I could buy InDesign, but it’s not cheap, and apart from this problem, PageMaker is fine for me, at least for the moment.

Why ME? Because I have a spare license for this OS. I could run XP in the VM, but I’d need another license for that.

Chris

I have experienced similar notification on maybe four or five occasions with XP in the last year. I initially assumed this to be some form of nasty, so I didn’t touch the dialog box, shut down Windows from the Task Manager, and did a complete virus scan after restart. However, this found no problems.

I also sometimes get a message during startup to say that the virus database is out-of-date. I suspect that sometimes the load process gets ahead of itself, and checks things before they have been initialized. In any case, it does not seem to have caused any problems.

Chris

…Remember that it will want to connect to download the latest definitions right away. That is often a fairly long process.

A better alternative might be to download the latest definitions at the same time as downloading the program.

Chris

That’s funny – I have Flash v11,1,102,55 installed, which I believe is the latest version. My Revo Uninstaller v1.92 shows this version for both the ActiveX and Plug-in versions.

Chris

I have been led to understand that one would need a separate license for each Windows VM. Is this incorrect? Would I be able to construct a Windows XP VM on my Windows XP box without needing another license?

Chris

Sometime back on my XP machine, I dumped Copernic for Windows Search 4.0 for Windows XP. I find this is much more convenient. A very similar search tool is included in Windows 7. This is a little more difficult to configure, but generally gets a good press.

Chris

I need a utility that will emit a specific character string when I press a hot-key combination – any recommendations?

JiimHH

AutoHotkey

I use it every day…

Chris

Re-sent again.

I zipped the articles as an attachment – maybe your program doesn’t like zip attachments? If so, I’ll send them all as separate text files.

Chris

Re-sent (not resent!)

Chris

I replied to the original E-mail two days back. Did you get it?

Chris