Twice a year my wife boots her legacy laptop and spends days on creating a photo book. I maxed the memory to 2Gb. But nothing more to update since no (cheap) SSD for IDE or processor upgrades available. This is why she spends days.

My hardware is up-to-date and thanks to Hyper-V I can share some of the power with her. By creating a virtual machine on my SSD equipped I5 Probook she can remote desktop from her own laptop and create the book with a faster user experience.

First I recovered the installer for the 2009 software to create the photo book. Back then the web-installer trick was already applied. The downloaded files were in the programs directory.

Then I created a Windows XP virtual machine with a differencing disk from a master VHD. I know the support has ended or will soon, but she likes XP and “never change a winning team”. Gave the VM the same 2Gb of memory. The faster processor and disk read speed will make the difference.

After installing the software and copying the photo’s to an attached VHD she was ready to catch up for the lost minutes and race to the finish line 😉