Your Work Environment
Setting Up Your PAFing Workbench
On this page we'll be setting up our workspace. Having a well organized desk or workbench can allow you to work a bit more smoothly and effectively, right? Well the same goes for PAF development. So I'll be walking you through the process in setting up VirtualBox with the proper utilities geared towards developing portable applications. First and foremost, go ahead and download VirtualBox if you haven't already done so. I'd recommend using Portable-VirtualBox for obvious reasons.
VirtualBox Setup
Once you've gotten your VirtualBox downloaded go ahead and launch it. It'll ask for administrative privileges if VirtualBox drivers are not already installed on your system. If you're using Portable-VirtualBox it'll ask you to download the required program files. Just follow the prompts to continue on. Once it's finished, select which architecture you'd like to extract; either 32bit and/or 64bit, it's your preference. Although I'd of course recommend x64 for compatibility with x64 programs.
Now would be a good time for you to go ahead and download WinLite. It's a miniature version of Windows XP stripped of unnecessary stuff leaving just the essentials. It's compressed as small as possible without omitting its main features. So, when you install this on your virtual machine you will end up with a file size of about 170mb. The installation process only takes about 10-15 minutes. So you'll be up and running in no time. This is what I use for WinXP support.
OS Installation
While we will be focusing on installing Windows XP Lite, the guidelines we'll be using here can be used for newer versions of Windows as well.