I upgraded my lenovo laptop (32-bit R60) to the latest ubuntu stable (pangolin - 12.04.3) I had vmware running on it, supporting my highly-configured pre-activated OEM winxp vm. That used the technique of referring to an external bios (bios440.filename = asus_314.rom) to pre-activate the windows (as an ASUS computer). This arrangement makes for a HIGHLY portable virtual machine. That door now seems to have been closed. The installed vmware won't run under this version of ubuntu (at least without a lot of time-consuming patching, repeated for every kernel update -- not a viable solution). The current version of vmware won't run on my 32-bit laptop because it now lacks some BIOS or CPU capability that vmware wants (forgot to make a note of it). Virtualbox will bring up the machine, but I'm having trouble activating it (I've already resigned myself to a less-portable winXP solution). If I run the OEMBIOS tool from the OEMBIOS Archive (sorry, I can't post the link) in virtualbox then I get a message "None of the 126 contained OEMBIOS sets will preactivate this system" (I posted a screen shot). I see there are Lenovo codes in the oembios archive, so I still have some hope, but I'm wondering what the best path is. I need to use this as a 'demonstration case' because I have clients with critical line-of business applications on WinXP, hosted on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid). Lucid has reached reached the end of its life, and I'd really rather not have to tell them that that they need to buy a new computer to allow us to upgrade ubuntu, which VMware doesn't like, etc. etc. In this particular situation, the activation code on the laptop won't work 'cause the license is for "refurbished" winXP, and the image I am using is from a template I made years ago from an I-don't-know-what-source OEM XP disk. So, is there a way to pre-activate my winXP VM under virtualbox (ubuntu host), given that the oembios tool does not report a known OEMBIOS? Please keep in mind I'm looking for a solution that can be generalized to a couple of other installs on differing hardware. And, should I be (cross-) posting this to any other forums? Thanks in advance!