New
#101
I'm heading out on vacation this weekend, but when I get back I'm going to attempt to do this virtual machine thing and play around a little more with imaging and such. Are you familiar with that Hyper-V thing that other poster mentioned? Or would you recommend something like VMware or VirtualBox?
It appears that I'm not the only one who has had problems with activating MS Office 2010. Found this link on Microsoft's website for fixing the issue: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2400124
I haven't tried it yet, but I have one computer that isn't activating so am going to give this a go and see what happens.
I would really recommend that you start with something like VMWare or VirtualBox. Hyper-V is a little difficult for starters to understand. I would recommend that you use VMWare- its what I personally use and its free for noncommercial use (good for playing around on your own time when you're not at work). Its pretty simple to use.
Just remember:
-If you're going to be putting windows 10 x64 on a virtual machine, you'll want the virtual machine to at least have these specs for optimal performance:
CPU: 2 cores
RAM: 4 GB
HDD: 60 GB
Virtual machines can require a little bit of horsepower. You'll probably want to make sure your host machine (the computer you'll be running the VM on) has at least 6 GB of RAM and enough hard drive space. You can cut back on the power you'll need by choosing to run the 32 bit version of windows 10 in the VM- all editions of Windows 10 you can get from the Microsoft website (and you'd probably want to anyways- .isos are most ideal for VM's).
The correct way to do this is by using a RIS server https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/325862
You're after "VMWare Workstation Player *12*" (12 is their latest version). Their website is pretty confusing- I won't lie, I've gotten lost on it looking for it as well.
It seems that this is the download page:
VMWare Workstation 12 free
You'll obviously want the Windows x64 version (since I assume that is what you're 'host machine' will have). I can also help with getting started with VMWare player.
Here's a screenshot of the version info with VMWare installed on my machine: