Yellow Snow Warning from the BBC?

My favourite piece of reporting about the snowy weather we are having is from the BBC web site which states:

There are also yellow snow warnings for eastern parts of England and Scotland, stretching across the Midlands into north Wales.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21106626

Updating Windws XP in Virtualbox

As everything slows down in Windows it came time to add more resources to my Windows XP running in Virtualbox.

 Memory, not a problem just add some more in the VirtualBox Settings. Don't add more than 4 GB as Windows XP can't use it. Increase the Disk size.

I was running short of disk and wanted to extend the VDI. This is easily managed using

vboxmanage modifyhd "vdi file name" --resize "size you want in mb"

in my case it was vboxmanage modifyhd NewXP.vdi --resize 20480

That increases the size of the disk under VirtualBox, you now need to extend the partition for Windows to make use of it.

My solution was to use Gparted iso image.

Download a GPartEd ISO and save it somewhere where VirtualBox can find it. Boot your WIndows XP machine using the GpartEd iso image as the virtual cd in VIrtualbox. GParted will then let you extend the partition to use all of the disk. Restart into Windows XP to check that you have all the disk accessible. Windows may CHKDSK on reboot, this is normal.

Finally I added an additional cpu core to the VistualBox machine under the machine settings.

Windows can't see use the additional core until it has a multicore kernel and HAL in place. To do this Turn off Driver Signing in Wondows XP by going through

My Computer:Properties:Hardware:Driver Signing and set it to ignore (you can set this back afterwards if you so wish)

Then run (from the command line)

 rundll32 syssetup,SetupInfObjectInstallAction ACPIAPIC_MP_HAL 128 %windir%\inf\hal.inf

A couple of reboots and Bob's you uncle a re-juvinated Windows XP.