When I was little, getting ready for school in the fall meant buying loose-leaf paper, pencils, binders, all the usual kid stuff. These days, back-to-school apparently entails lots of digging through CD spindles and watching progress bars.

I’m starting school bright and early at 10:10 tomorrow (which means I really shouldn’t be up and blogging at 4:30 AM, but I’m not the sharpest brick in the load…) and I’m taking a 100% CIS course load. And my school apparently does EVERYTHING on Windows, which I don’t use; I’m a Linux and Mac OS X guy. That means I’d probably be wise to arrange handy access to a Windows system.

So… I spent a good chunk of the evening setting up a Windows XP virtual machine running under QEMU on my laptop. For the non-techies, this lets my computer pretend to have another computer inside of it, and that pretend computer runs Windows.

To get it all set up, I first had to rummage through the aforementioned CD spindles to find an old XP CD-ROM, install it onto a new hard disk image, download and install eleventy-hoojillion patches and updates via Windows Update, and get everything configured the way I like it.

Then it was back to the spindles to hunt down a set of Office 2000 discs. Yeah, it’s ancient. I don’t care. I’m not shelling out seven grand or whatever the hell MS charges for an upgrade; 2000 still gets the job done. Oh, and Windows can still get the nasties when it’s running in a virtual machine; better add some antivirus and anti-spyware. And Firefox. And Java. And Flash. And 7zip. And and and…

Anyways, the damn thing is finally set up acceptably. And it really runs pretty well; my machine has a 1.8 GHz Pentium-M, and the Windows VM feels about like a 1 GHz PIII. No speed demon, but entirely usable.

A few tips for anyone else looking to do this:

• Use the KQEMU kernel module accelerator. Yes, you’ll probably have to manually compile it against your kernel. Do it anyways. The performance improvement is worth it.
• Disable ACPI with the -no-acpi flag. That’s another big performance boost.
• Turn off all the eye candy and switch to 16-bit color inside Windows. MOAR speed!
• Use the -tftp flag to activate QEMU’s built-in TFTP server, so you can easily move files from Linux to Windows and back.

A pretty screenshot:

… and I’m hittin’ the sack.