Thanks for your thoughts Audrey and Alec and a Happy New Year to you both and all our friends on Synthzone.
A special thanks to Nigel for continuing to provide us with this great Forum

Hello technicsplayer,

When you mention a 'virtual clone copy of XP to run' do you mean the virtual backup of my Windows 7? (which is one of the first things I did when I upgraded to Windows 7 Professional) or could the XP setup disks that came with the XP system be used instead?

I look forward to your reply as this topic has been mentioned several times at our Club and none of us know the answer.

Audrey

Hi Audrey

If you have Windows 7 Pro pop over to this link Virtual XP to download and install virtual XP.

If you are using a lesser or different version of Windows then you will need a genuine copy of XP to load into a virtual environment, with VMWare being a popular option.]

Microsoft Office is a totally separate program from Windows, and can be installed on any version of Windows that meet the minimum requirements. (Including standard versions of Windows)

Hope this helps

Bill

Thanks for the info Bill. I thought I'd got it covered but apparently not.

Anyway, XP wont be around much longer according my last week's Computer magazine. It made a point of mentioning that as from the 8th April 2014, Microsoft will no longer support XP at all, so anyone using it should be putting NEW SECURITY on their computers right now, as it will leave them open to ALL THE 'NASTIES'

However, they did also mention that at present, FIREFOX have no plans to withdraw their support and will continue to vigorously protect their customers' from all viruses, malware, hackers etc. to the best of their ability. Perhaps we should all go over to Firefox eh?

Audrey

Audrey, running virtual XP on Windows 7 Pro to run some XP software is not at all a problem. Your operating system is still Windows 7 Pro. You would not need to connect to the Internet from virtual XP.

Thanks for your reply Nigel. I'll pass this on to our other Club Members.

Happy New Year to you and yours (better late than never eh?)

Audrey

Thanks so much Audrey Happy New Year to you as well. I actually have a Windows 8 PC and IE has become a problem on that so I finally decided to make Mozilla Firefox my browser and I am so glad I did. It doesn't have any of the problems I was having with IE.

I had already changed my email program to Mozilla Thunderbird so I was confident that Mozilla Firefox would also be a good choice ... and it was. And they are both free and you can't beat that price.

Hi Nigel, been using Firefox for over 6 years now and it's been just great,many of the add on's are very useful to.
regards John