Right here in Virtual River City. With a Virtual Tea and that rhymes with “W” and that stands for “Windows XP”.
Apologies to Robert Preston. Theoretically, it is possible to take a virtual installation of a guest OS with you and use it on any computer that has your virtualization software installed on it. To wit: if I have VirtualBox installed on two computers, then I can take my Windows XP installation VDI file, slap it onto a USB flash drive, scoot it over to the other computer, and use Virtual Windows XP on that other computer like it was nuthin.
We all need more 1930s slang in our lives. Go to this website. If you don’t it will be a brodie. I’ll bulge.
Enough of that. The point that I’m trying to make is that I should have been able to use Windows XP again on my Linux desktop by simply copy+pasting the .vdi file over from backup to my home folder.
And like the other 5 times I’ve tried it with a VirtualBox .vdi file, it has not fucking worked at fucking all. Fuck.
Fuck is good slang. Everyone understands fuck.
So off to reinstalling Windows I’ve gone. Actually, that part is already done. As is the part where I download and install Windows updates for a couple of hours. I’ve got it up to XP SP3 now, and I’m reinstalling my applications. Avast, SpyBot, CCleaner and all those other apps that keep Windows from being too annoying. I didn’t lose anything by starting all over because I had no data in that installation. It was all just functionality.
It just adds another day to the process and gives me two entire OSs to reinstall.
And now to bitch and complain. I don’t know if it’s the new video card being slower or the new version of VirtualBox being bad… but my god, Windows is SLOW now. I can speed it up by using TweakUI to turn off the silly animated popups, menus and windows, but it won’t be faster by much.
Sigh. Some things change for the better, some for the not better.