Thank you for your further input, Mike, cjt, cl...@snyder, rbowman and bill . I had success today. :)
From your comments here and chatter on the net in general, I figured I had not yet created a bootable disk. This was despite a lot of effort with my h ome desktop computer and freeware for burning DVDs. I also remembered some chatter on the net about free iso files for Windows XP Professional. Hm. So why not try one of the latter? Today I:
-- Went to my public library. I found Windows 7 is installed on old desktop s with DVD drives.
-- Downloaded an iso file for Windows XP Professional from pcriver.com
-- Downloaded an iso file for Windows Mint xfce
-- Right clicked on the Windows XP Professional iso file. Some Windows 7 so ftware came up for burning files onto a blank DVD.
-- I googled on the Windows 7 disc burning software. The signs were good I was going to get a bootable disk out of it.
-- I clicked on the "verify disc after burning" option. I reviewed all the fill-in-the-blanks to make sure the source file (namely, the iso file on th e desktop) and destination (the blank DVD in the DVD drive) were correct. I went forward with the burning, and all seemed to go well.
-- I repeated this for the linux iso file. T
-- I took my two newly burned DVDs home to try them. I set the BIOS to boot from the DVD drive. Both DVDs went right into the installation software, w ith everything looking as it should.
-- I decided to continue with the Windows XP Professional Edition, since I already have a copy of 2006 MS Works and 2000 MS Word that work fine with W indows XP. My 2006 MS Works and MS Word installed just fine. The pirated Wi ndows XP Professional copy works great.
-- Once the Windows XP Professional Edition was installed, I went to "Run" and ran winmsd.exe . No "Activation Status" line appeared. Hurrah (so far)! For my 2006 Windows XP Home Edition, running winmsd.exe shows the "days re maining" to activation, reminding me of all the nightmare it has been to tr y to workaround the activation.
-- If for some reason the pirated Windows XP Professional Edition fails, I am ready to switch to Linux again.
-- I was pretty frustrated yesterday. Today I feel like I have much more po wer over my home computer and its software. It's like the days back in grad school in the late 1980s and mid-1990s, using sofware that was much more c ommand based. If I changed a line, I knew what to expect. De-bugging was a logical process. So I have one leg back in those good ol' days of doing my own 'coding' but feeling like I am not taking all these shots in the dark t o make a program work.
Sorry for not calling everyone out by name. All: Thank you for the technica l and moral support. Knowing something is possible is huge incentive to sti ck with trying to achieve it.
Elle
"Having a job is expensive. If you spend all your time working for someone else, you don't have any time to learn to do things yourself."
-- Charley Groden in the 2003 film, "Off the Map"