Looking for help setting up a Virual Machine. Any takers? Please?

My understanding of a VM is that I can set it up on my computer, and
if I set it up with say Win 3.11 I can run old 3.11 programs. And
should I run a virus infested program, when I am done and I turn off
the VM --==@@**POOF!**@@==-- it is all gone like a bad dream with no
lasting effect.

I have a computer with VISTA - not a bad OS as long as you don't like
to play games. But I do like to play games and it ****es me off that
games I have payed for cannot be played on the system.

I would like to set up a VM with DOS, Win 95 SE and XP.
If anyone would be so kind as to be willing to help me with this I
would be ever grateful.

I have DOS box. Does this take the place of VM'ing DOS?

Please!! I JUST WANT TO PLAY MY **** GAMES!!!

AND, FYI, using the compatibility setting in Vista doesn't do jack.
Not jack.
Well, it takes my time up. And I tweak it. And I hope. ANd I pray.
And I may as well be praying to the BSOD for all the good it does.

So, if you have taken your antidepressants or your pain meds or even
your viagra and you are feeling kindly or perhaps you are looking to
do just 1 good thing today. Well here I am.
Please help me.

Just tell me in really small words what I need to do to run a VM on my
computer.

Thanks
Bonnie Peebles

B__P@hotmail.com wrote:
> My understanding of a VM is that I can set it up on my computer, and
> if I set it up with say Win 3.11 I can run old 3.11 programs. And
> should I run a virus infested program, when I am done and I turn off
> the VM --==@@**POOF!**@@==-- it is all gone like a bad dream with no
> lasting effect.
>
> I have a computer with VISTA - not a bad OS as long as you don't like
> to play games. But I do like to play games and it ****es me off that
> games I have payed for cannot be played on the system.
>
> I would like to set up a VM with DOS, Win 95 SE and XP.
> If anyone would be so kind as to be willing to help me with this I
> would be ever grateful.
>
> I have DOS box. Does this take the place of VM'ing DOS?
>
> Please!! I JUST WANT TO PLAY MY **** GAMES!!!
>
> AND, FYI, using the compatibility setting in Vista doesn't do jack.
> Not jack.
> Well, it takes my time up. And I tweak it. And I hope. ANd I pray.
> And I may as well be praying to the BSOD for all the good it does.
>
> So, if you have taken your antidepressants or your pain meds or even
> your viagra and you are feeling kindly or perhaps you are looking to
> do just 1 good thing today. Well here I am.
> Please help me.
>
> Just tell me in really small words what I need to do to run a VM on my
> computer.
>
> Thanks
> Bonnie Peebles

Since I don't play those kind of games, I don't have any ready made
recipes to share.

Generally, what these environments share, is a weak connection to real
hardware.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dosbox

For example, I use VirtualPC (the free download from Microsoft you can
run on WinXP), and if I run Win2K in a window, then check the Device Manager,
Win2K thinks the video is "S3 Trio 32/64". That means the video capability
is an emulation, presumably of something which has readily available
specifications, so an emulation could be written. Now, an S3 Trio is probably
not something you'd expect to get 100 FPS while playing Bioshock, so
the VirtualPC environment is not a way to run Direct3D or OpenGL at
high speed.

An older version of VirtualPC for the Mac (back when Connectix owned VirtualPC),
had the ability to tunnel through to a 3DFX video card, so there was
actual hardware support for gaming. I think I played Quake at 1 frame
per second, using that capability. Since it was a Mac, the PC instruction
emulation was the rate limiting step.

My recommendation, would be to try out the various environments, and
see what you can get from them. Not everything in the computing world
comes in a neat package, and "some user assembly may be required".

I do use VirtualPC for the reason you suggest - a quick and safe way
to test software. But again, don't be lulled to sleep by the
apparent safely. There is no reason to believe a virus or Trojan writer
could not escape from the virtual environment. At the moment, such
security, is "security by obscurity", meaning virus writers don't see
the monetary advantage to attacking such environments. If only 0.1% of
users have virtual environments, it would hardly make sense to waste
time on it. (Maybe as a proof of concept.)

Paul

B__P@hotmail.com wrote:
> My understanding of a VM is that I can set it up on my computer, and
> if I set it up with say Win 3.11 I can run old 3.11 programs. And
> should I run a virus infested program, when I am done and I turn off
> the VM --==@@**POOF!**@@==-- it is all gone like a bad dream with no
> lasting effect.
>
> I have a computer with VISTA - not a bad OS as long as you don't like
> to play games. But I do like to play games and it ****es me off that
> games I have payed for cannot be played on the system.
>
> I would like to set up a VM with DOS, Win 95 SE and XP.
> If anyone would be so kind as to be willing to help me with this I
> would be ever grateful.
>
> I have DOS box. Does this take the place of VM'ing DOS?
>
> Please!! I JUST WANT TO PLAY MY **** GAMES!!!
>
> AND, FYI, using the compatibility setting in Vista doesn't do jack.
> Not jack.
> Well, it takes my time up. And I tweak it. And I hope. ANd I pray.
> And I may as well be praying to the BSOD for all the good it does.
>
> So, if you have taken your antidepressants or your pain meds or even
> your viagra and you are feeling kindly or perhaps you are looking to
> do just 1 good thing today. Well here I am.
> Please help me.
>
> Just tell me in really small words what I need to do to run a VM on my
> computer.
>
> Thanks
> Bonnie Peebles


Hi,

You have a number of choices, some free and some not free. Among them:

MS Virtual PC 2007 SP1 (VPC) - Free
Sun VirtualBox - Free (I think, I haven't used it)
VMware Player - Free*
VMware Workstation - $

WinXP shouldn't be a problem with any of those virtualization products,
but I think that you may have varying success DOS and Win98SE, i.e.,
you'll have to try it.

The (*) for VMware Player is that you can't create a virtual machine
with it, but you can run a VMware guest that you already created some
other way. Usually, this means creating the guest using VMware
Workstation, but I think that you can use VPC to create a guest, then
import that guest into VMware Player... a kind of workaround.

The other thing you'll need to look at is that all of these provide a
virtual environment, including a virtual video card, so you'll be
limited by what the virtual environment can provide for that.

Finally, I think all of these use "real memory" for the guests, so
you'll need enough physical memory in your host PC to support the guests
that you want, i.e., roughly, if you have two guests running on Vista
host, you'll need enough memory in your PC to support both Vista plus
the amount of memory for each of the guests that you want to be running
simultaneously.

Of those, I'm most familiar with VPC, and there's a pretty active MS
newsgroup for that. VMware also has their forums.

Good luck...

Jim

ohaya wrote:
>
>
> B__P@hotmail.com wrote:
>> My understanding of a VM is that I can set it up on my computer, and
>> if I set it up with say Win 3.11 I can run old 3.11 programs. And
>> should I run a virus infested program, when I am done and I turn off
>> the VM --==@@**POOF!**@@==-- it is all gone like a bad dream with no
>> lasting effect.
>>
>> I have a computer with VISTA - not a bad OS as long as you don't like
>> to play games. But I do like to play games and it ****es me off that
>> games I have payed for cannot be played on the system.
>>
>> I would like to set up a VM with DOS, Win 95 SE and XP.
>> If anyone would be so kind as to be willing to help me with this I
>> would be ever grateful.
>>
>> I have DOS box. Does this take the place of VM'ing DOS?
>>
>> Please!! I JUST WANT TO PLAY MY **** GAMES!!!
>>
>> AND, FYI, using the compatibility setting in Vista doesn't do jack.
>> Not jack.
>> Well, it takes my time up. And I tweak it. And I hope. ANd I pray.
>> And I may as well be praying to the BSOD for all the good it does.
>>
>> So, if you have taken your antidepressants or your pain meds or even
>> your viagra and you are feeling kindly or perhaps you are looking to
>> do just 1 good thing today. Well here I am.
>> Please help me.
>>
>> Just tell me in really small words what I need to do to run a VM on my
>> computer.
>>
>> Thanks
>> Bonnie Peebles
>
>
> Hi,
>
> You have a number of choices, some free and some not free. Among them:
>
> MS Virtual PC 2007 SP1 (VPC) - Free
> Sun VirtualBox - Free (I think, I haven't used it)
> VMware Player - Free*
> VMware Workstation - $
>
> WinXP shouldn't be a problem with any of those virtualization products,
> but I think that you may have varying success DOS and Win98SE, i.e.,
> you'll have to try it.
>
> The (*) for VMware Player is that you can't create a virtual machine
> with it, but you can run a VMware guest that you already created some
> other way. Usually, this means creating the guest using VMware
> Workstation, but I think that you can use VPC to create a guest, then
> import that guest into VMware Player... a kind of workaround.

You can download VMmanager from Sourceforge.net to create VM's for
VMWare Player.
>
> The other thing you'll need to look at is that all of these provide a
> virtual environment, including a virtual video card, so you'll be
> limited by what the virtual environment can provide for that.
>
> Finally, I think all of these use "real memory" for the guests, so
> you'll need enough physical memory in your host PC to support the guests
> that you want, i.e., roughly, if you have two guests running on Vista
> host, you'll need enough memory in your PC to support both Vista plus
> the amount of memory for each of the guests that you want to be running
> simultaneously.
>
> Of those, I'm most familiar with VPC, and there's a pretty active MS
> newsgroup for that. VMware also has their forums.
>
> Good luck...
>
> Jim
>

B__P@hotmail.com wrote:
> My understanding of a VM is that I can set it up on my computer, and
> if I set it up with say Win 3.11 I can run old 3.11 programs. And
> should I run a virus infested program, when I am done and I turn off
> the VM --==@@**POOF!**@@==-- it is all gone like a bad dream with no
> lasting effect.
>
> I have a computer with VISTA - not a bad OS as long as you don't like
> to play games. But I do like to play games and it ****es me off that
> games I have payed for cannot be played on the system.
>
> I would like to set up a VM with DOS, Win 95 SE and XP.
> If anyone would be so kind as to be willing to help me with this I
> would be ever grateful.
>
> I have DOS box. Does this take the place of VM'ing DOS?
>
> Please!! I JUST WANT TO PLAY MY **** GAMES!!!
>
> AND, FYI, using the compatibility setting in Vista doesn't do jack.
> Not jack.
> Well, it takes my time up. And I tweak it. And I hope. ANd I pray.
> And I may as well be praying to the BSOD for all the good it does.
>
> So, if you have taken your antidepressants or your pain meds or even
> your viagra and you are feeling kindly or perhaps you are looking to
> do just 1 good thing today. Well here I am.
> Please help me.
>
> Just tell me in really small words what I need to do to run a VM on my
> computer.
>
> Thanks
> Bonnie Peebles

Is it possible for you set up a dualboot between XP and Vista? That
seems to me to be the best option if you want an older OS just for
playing games. You aren't going to get great graphics in a VM. If a game
isn't working on Vista simply boot into the other OS. What games are you
having trouble with? All the games I'm playing work just fine on Vista.