trubleshooting a laptop

[Paul Smith]

On Wed, 2013-03-27 at 16:27 -0400, Ric Moore wrote:
> > I sincerely doubt you'll be able to test all this stuff in a Live
> DVD
> > session, by the way...
> 
> He made the point that the laptop was 5 years old and was suffering 
> running Windows natively. Running MS Office under emulation using Wine
> won't help that, I would think.

Actually I disagree.  In fact I'd be very surprised if it didn't run at
least as well if not better.  Remember that Wine is NOT an emulator (as
the name says...:-))  Wine is not a virtual machine, like VMWare, KVM,
or VirtualBox, and it does not run Windows.  That's why you don't need a
copy of Windows nor a Windows license to run Wine.

Wine is a complete rewrite of the Windows system DLLs (shared
libraries), with Win32 APIs on top and POSIX/Linux APIs underneath.  It
allows you to run Windows programs as _native Linux applications_.

So, you don't need a Windows install DVD to use Wine; that's why I said
she should bring her Microsoft _Office_ CD or DVD, so MS Office can be
installed on the Linux system.  She won't need any Windows installation
media at all.