This episode shows how to install XP as a virtual machine on either Windows XP or Vista. For more videos visit http://screencastr.com


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Video Transcription

Welcome to screen cast episode 7, I am Michael Stewart and on this episode, I am going to show you how to run a virtual machine. There are many reasons you would want a virtual PC, maybe you do not like Vista so you want to XP, or you want to try an application that could be a virus. A virtual installation is exactly what you need, to install XP on a virtual machine, you are going to need an XP installation disk in Microsoft virtual PC 2007, which is a free download. Once you have download and installed Microsoft virtual PC, you can then run the program. The Virtual PC Console looks like this, when you open it up, you would not have this machine in it since you want to have something else, so you are just going to press new. Once this dialogue box appears, click next, then click on create a virtual machine, and you type in virtual PC, click next. Operating system, select windows XP, click next again, leave the recommended RAM and I am going to select a new virtual hard disk that can be the virtual hard disk, just in the default location. Okay, so once you have created this virtual machine, you can now go ahead and put your windows XP installation disk into your CD drive. Then, you press start and it should looks something like this, use double click on the CD drive and it should go into the normal windows XP installation process. If that does not work, just close it, it is like turn off, then start it again and the CD drive should be already selected and it will boot into it. I am now going to go and boot in to the virtual machine that I had prepared earlier. The virtual machine starts up just like a normal PC, and you can do basically anything on it, including accessing the internet even your network, and the best feature of the virtual machine is that if you close it, you can select to delete the changes that were made. So, if any bad software was installed or you stuff around with the settings, you select this and all the changes will be deleted. And the next time you boot, it will load just like before. Now, the advantages of this is that it may mean that you would not have to activate windows because if you just keep deleting the changes, you will still have the 30 days period of activation left. This week download of the week is an application called Z-Cron, a replacement for the default window task schedule. Z-Cron has a graphical interface and allows you to perform task such as copying a folder, breaking under computers on a LAN or sending an email, which previously required bat files to run. As you can see here, I have just my alarm, which wake me up in the morning. If we open this file, you can see that it is just running this bat file, and here you can see when it is scheduled run. Here you can see all the commands that Z-Cron lets you execute. For example, you can delete a file, you can download something, you can see haze z v vertical, you can log on or out the system, or you can kill a program. It also hang out a dollar connection, paying an IP address on the network or reboot your computer, and, decolonize all of these without even using a bat file. The website of the week for this week is fonstruct, fonstruct tries an easy way for you to create your own font. You can click here to start, and once you have create an account and logged in then you can make a new fontsruction. I have already started one here and I am going to go in and edit it. Here is the fonstruct interface, and as you can see down the bottom here, you have to create all the letters from A to Zed with uppercase and lowercase, then number and the special characters. So, I am going to start off with the letter A and I am just going to draw a basic A shape, then using this different task of bricks, you can curve the edges or basically do almost anything. So, I am going to put these edges on and that is my capital A, you can zoom in and out with this and once you have finished all the letters, you can then download your font and have it on your computer. So, that is it for this week’s episode of screencastr, if you want links and instructions fo