Quote:
Originally Posted by abecedarian
Quoth, that's an interesting possibility that you propose, because that would eliminate the ground zero state of installing Windows 10. 
I didn't know about the thing called EFI bios. I looked it up and it is said to have been developed by Intel. Is that right? Now my computer doesn't run on an Intel cpu but on an AMD Phenom II processor. So I think I could use that MS imaging tool. Could you please tell me the name of that tool? I've never used software like that nor VM software. |
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sys...loads/disk2vhd
There are THREE check boxes on the program I downloaded. Untick Shadow and Tick Prepare for VM.
It makes an EXACT copy of your hard drive for a Virtual machine. So what ever you have, that's what you get, except the sound, USB, video and network will use new drivers installed by the Guest Tools. So you don't have the originals of those.
The speed depends on RAM, CPU and the HDD you use. You'd probably only run Linux on the EXISTING PC, Win10 would likely need a newer computer, 8G RAM and 64 bits recommended.
My 2002 Dell was a 1.8 GHz 1G RAM Pentium 4 mobile, 32 bit single core. So naturally the VM version of it, which has ALL the same settings and programs, runs MUCH faster on my 2016 laptop, which was about €550. It has 8G RAM, 500 G WD Black HDD, 3D gpu gfx, i5 CPU 2.3GHz x4 core.
I did have to revalidate MS Office, which was a 6 minute free phone call to Microsoft, totally automated. MS Office regarded it as a "new motherboard"
I gave away two Windows 10 laptop/tablets, they were so poor. So 100% using Linux Mint with Mate Desktop since jan 2017. I did dual boot for 6 weeks and then deleted Windows.
I also have a copy of Office 2003 on WINE on Linux, for tests, but I use LO Writer.
I'd been using a lot of SW used on Linux since 2008 on XP, Filezilla, wget, dd, Thunderbird, Open Office (then LibreOffice), The Gimp, Inkscape, Firefox etc.
The only requirement is that the Source Windows XP, Vista or Win7 is using the non-EFI boot even if the computer has EFI.
The boot method, AMD or Intel, or OS is irrelevant on the new host.