Question of Virtual PC

My old computer died and I replaced with a Dell Inspiron 530 with Vista Home Premium. Pagemaker 6.5 won't load and Photoshop 6 runs but very slow.

I could use some advice and on setting Virtual PC:

I have a Widows 98 disk that came with older programs. Could these be used for Virtual PC?

Can you make a partition to run Virtual PC in with out a complete reformat?

I have a Western Digital external USB Backup-could Virtual PC be installed on it?

As you can see, I'm completely ignorant about using Virtual PC but would really like to regain access to PageMaker.

Thanks for your help and suggestions.

Bill Trammell

Hi Bill,

Yes, you can download Virtual PC 2007 from Microsoft and install your Windows 98.

It's not like setting up a dual boot system where you create a seperate partition and install there. You install Virtual PC 2007 in Vista, then when you run it, it'll prompt you several questions to create a virtual machine (VM).

When you first setup a VM, you have to specify the OS you are installing, location of your VM (it selects a default location in your documents folder, but you can change the location to a different folder), how much RAM (limited by your physical RAM) and hard drive space to assign (limited by the OS you are installing and your hard drive space). Then when you insert the Win98 CD, you'll go through an installation like normal. You'll need to create and format the partitions in your virtual machine.

I have a Windows XP Pro and a Windows NT VM setup on my system. I even setup a shared folder so that I can transfer files back and forth between Vista and my VM's.

I hope that helps.

wjtrammell said:

My old computer died and I replaced with a Dell Inspiron 530 with Vista Home Premium. Pagemaker 6.5 won't load and Photoshop 6 runs but very slow.

I could use some advice and on setting Virtual PC:

I have a Widows 98 disk that came with older programs. Could these be used for Virtual PC?

Can you make a partition to run Virtual PC in with out a complete reformat?

I have a Western Digital external USB Backup-could Virtual PC be installed on it?

As you can see, I'm completely ignorant about using Virtual PC but would really like to regain access to PageMaker.

Thanks for your help and suggestions.

Bill Trammell

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