On 03/02/12 14:22, Anthony Anson wrote:
"Oh, reinstall it!" is the usual Billyware user's remedy. As Penguinistas will well know, this will result in XP marking all the territory round it like an incontinent dog - so - here is the question: I have a (legal) XP Pro CD, SP 3, and WGA Crack.
If it's legal why do you need the WGA crack ?
What is the concensus of the cognoiscenti - should I install a severely truncated XP to USB memory, or run a similarly curtailed XP in Virtual Box?
I tend towards the former solution as the XP can then run any of my machines (any which will boot from USB, that is...), and running a virtual XP will surely take up nearly as much HDD space as keeping it in its own partition?
XP generally hates being moved between machines like that. WGA crack or not you will still probably repeatedly kick off the Activation Mechanism even if it boots (which if the hardware is sufficiently different it might not)
About the only way you will get this to work reliably is by using a PE variant of Windows or a set of tools to build a PE version of Windows XP yourself although the only free one I am aware of "BartPE" was designed for building to a DVD image not a USB stick...To get access to the "official" tool for doing this you need to be a registered System Builder
If the Acer has plenty of RAM I would go the virtualisation route every time. vbox has sufficient 2D acceleration to handle Photoshop etc for light duties and you can move the machine between Hosts at will....That said if you can justify the combined cost of Photoshop and Paintshop pro for whatever you are doing then you may want to consider financing a dedicated machine to run them.