Emotions OS 8

It's Windows 8 for this blogger at this point in time.

We already said in an earlier post that when you buy something you give away money and time. And we tied the latter to abysmal customer satisfaction where the time you spend is out of whack compared to the value of the product or service.

There can also be an emotional investment, usually not into a specific brand of unremarkable stuff, say, pasta, but all you iPhonies out there know what I mean.

One of the more emotionally charged purchases is the new computer with its new operating system.

Today is Microsoft Windows 8 day, but first a few words about emotional attachment. If you live in Europe and have used a certain version of Microsoft Windows, a certain version of MS Outlook, or run a certain version of MS Exchange Server, you have used stuff that the author of this post built with you in mind. It's not corny -- the user meant and means something to many MS folks. Not to all of them, not to all of the lawyers or the sales whizzes, but to many.
The emotional thing is: How can I save the old stuff from the weird little machine that refuses to die?

Copying data to the new box or to an external drive is only part of the story.
The Microsoft folks know this. They have to get new boxes too, and getting a good discount on the latest OS version saves money but not time.

However, you can use a few wonderful software programs to turn your old computer into a "virtual machine" and put it onto the new one.

Windows in Windows, the computer version of double pane house windows.

Companies have been doing this for quite a while, but it is getting easier for normal users, too. Here is what you need for your new and old MS Windows machines:

1) Spend a few dollars more on the new machine, with 8 or more GB of RAM, full HD screen, and a decent graphics card.
2) Go to VMWare, and download two programs, the VMWare Player, and the vConverter. The first one, free for non-commercial use goes onto the new box, and it will run our "virtual" old machine. The converter requires registration and is a time limited version, but you only need it for a day or so.
3) Install the converter on the old box. Start the converter, select "local machine", and for the location to save the "vm", give a path to a second hard drive or over the network to a folder on the new box.
4) When the conversion is done, start the VM player on the new machine, navigate to the ".vmx" you created in step 3, select it, and "Play".

And now, it will get just a little weird.

It is almost assured that you will get the message that you must activate Windows on the new machine.

There are, I believe, a couple of people alive today for whom the official instruction has worked: Find an activation key, enter it -- done.

For millions of others, including me, it failed.

I am the proud owner of not one but two activation keys. Both failed for the virtual machine.

Believing in the virtue of users, I called customer service. Nice, trained in the military spelling (Hotel, Yankee, Charlie) but the keys could not be validated.

And this was when an evaluation of the emotional content and the investment of time was performed and subsequently followed a few internet searches.

The virtual machine is now up and running, and the old little Dell faces another life running Linux with, would you guess, protein folding software.

One more thing:
I threw the tiles out of the Windows 8 and have a cute retro Desktop, you know, the kind where you say, "ah, they don't make them like this anymore."