Quote Originally Posted by off-track View Post
Please forgive me as I'm new to this forum and haven't fooled with Ubuntu for at least 10 years.
Nothing to forgive. You are very welcome here and it's good to see old users peering under the hood to check out what's new. Ubuntu has come a long way over the last decade. It is now slick enough for general users.
I didn't want to support MS and their office subscription model.
I find it mind‑cramping that the consuming public lets them get away with this. But hey… I stopped understanding Windows users years ago.
…I had this old HP down in the storeroom and thought I'd give it a shot?…it indicates that it's a HP 2AFE and there's only 3Gb memory. I'll have to pop the top to see if it's expandable but I kind of doubt it?
Based on your description of the machine, even though it is now set to enable VMs, it will just choke and die if you try to run Windows.

I'm may be wrong, but I believe that Win10 won't even install with any less than 4GB RAM. Therefore, 3GB to run it in a VM is a non‑starter.

I'm afraid that you will have to either buy a new machine (even if you choose to run Windows on bare metal, your current box won't qualify), or try some fancier solution like PlayOnLinux.

I don't use PlayOnLinux so my info is hearsay, but I understand it to be an extension of WINE that adds some common elements (like dlls) that make some games playable. These games won't play on WINE. The same add‑ons may allow your tax app to run. No promises, but it may be worth a try.

To be honest, if I were you, I would invest in a proper box that could easily do everything that I wanted it to.

I recently set up a separate gaming computer for my grandkids. It was a refurbished Lenovo ultra slim mini box with a two generation's‑old Core i5, 16 GB RAM and a 500GB SSD. The thing retailed for US$125. I already had the monitor (as do you) so my total investment was absurdly low for a decent machine that had more than sufficient horsepower for anything that I cared to throw at it.

If you nose around your locel computer stores, I'm sure you can get refurbished or abandoned gear that's even less than what I paid. Stuff has gotten so cheap that it has become pointless to wrestle with problems imposed purely by resource limitations.