blabberer wrote:I am currently creating a new VM
that sounds as if it is a mammoth project
It shouldn't be but I get right into it with hammers, saws, and whatnot and by the time I finish it is a mammoth project.
blabberer wrote:you can reuse the virtual hard drives
Yeah...I do reuse them. I even have DOS and Win 98SE setup. I may even try Linus again to see if they have advanced from the dark days of Unix, pre-1980. They were making headway with their GUIs, like KDE (I hated Gnome), but their command line setup was still a horror show for a newbie.
With my present VM install, I wanted to be absolutely sure I had a clean install of XP so I started from square one.
Right now I am getting grief from that piece of crap otherwise known as Internet Explorer. I am trying to d/l Comodo's free firewall/antivirus package and IE tells me it can't connect to a certain site. So I d/led Firefox, which I should have done right off rather than fiddle with that over-bloated monstrosity. When Firefox asked if I wanted to make it the default, I said, "yes, please".
What kind of addled brain would one need to design something like IE? I tred to download a file that is fairly large and IE insisted on saving it as a link to my desktop. When I refused the offer and guided it to another directory, it d/l'd the large file as a link. Have you ever seen a file with a .lnk extension that is 145 megs long?
I see now what the problem was, I was trying to open the aforementioned lnk file before it was fully downloaded, but IE did not know that. It kept telling me it was a lnk file.
Then I opened its brother, File Explorer. There's another joke. If you want a dual pane situation, you have to open another instance of file explorer. Why...after all these years, have they not built in functionality to have a dual pane setup? Give up...I'll tell you why? They want you to do it there way. What you want as a user means nothing to msoft. Who else would gear an OS (win 8) at touch screens? Prefer a mouse...to bad...msoft is telling you how the future will be.
When you open explorer to view files, it insists on opening in documents and settings, and as you try to click on the file you want, it goes on resizing, forcing you to chase your desired directory with the mouse.
I had to edit this post to ad another whine. When you open file explorer under normal conditions, it lists the files but does not tell you the directory or path. That is pure Unix bs and that's what microsoft is trying to implement. In Unix, everything is a file, even a directory, and that's how msoft has designed the NTFS file system. I am discovering all that from my MFT project/thread which is on hold till I get softice running again.
It may be of interest to you to realize that the old DOS-style directory/file path is now merely a wrapper around the namespace base that msoft bases file explorer on. Yes...there is yet another hidden file system between the user and the MFT on an NTFS system. You might say the MFT is part of that hidden file system, and it gets processed by shell32 and shlwapi in conjunction with ole32. I haven't gotten into objects yet which have totally obfuscated the real hardware lying underneath the msoft OS.
The shell in shell32 is related to the shell the user sees. The user sees files and directories and shell32 translated them into item lists that break the path into objects.
To me, having grown up with computers in the early 80s. that kind of thinking is a major step backwards.
End of whine.
Talk about Big Brother. Microsoft knows best which directory you want to start in and how you will think in the future, which is actually the dark Unix past.
I gather from your blog that you have never given it much of a shot. I have spent hundreds of hours on it and I swear by it, when it's running. 
Running on XP with SP3, it's so solid it's sickening. It never crashes no matter what routes I take through Ring 0. 
