After choosing your language preferences and pressing next, you’ll be asked to specify additional drivers. It is a good idea to press F8 and disable driver signing under the “Boot Options” tab before continuing with setup.
You can get Windows XP Home Edition for free from Digital River – search “free XP download” on Google and follow the links to their website. Finally, if you don’t have a copy of XP handy, we recommend downloading a legal free trial. Next, attach an ISO image containing XP installation files (you could also use a CD or DVD, but you’ll need physical access to it while it’s in the VM and won’t be able to pre-configure anything). It will ensure that any snapshots are stored externally so other operating systems can access them without running out of space.
When prompted for the amount of hard disk space to use, enter at least 20GB – even if that’s more than you have available on your host machine. If you don’t know how to do this, google “create virtual machine” with the name of your preferred virtualization software.įor Virtual PC 2007, we recommend using a base RAM size of 1024 MB. Start by creating a new virtual machine in either Virtual PC or Hyper-V (we recommend Hyper-V if you have the option).
