[nmglug] urgent need for a Toshiba laptop charger OR with win vm on GNU/Linux

[Mark Galassi]

Dear nmglugers,

I urgently need a charger for a Toshiba laptop.  Mine just died.

The reason is that I am running a chess tournament this weekend. 
The
tournament needs this particular laptop, which I inherited from 
the guy
who used to run them.  It runs "windows 7 home premium 32bit" and 
a
piece of s/w called SwissSys which is required to submit 
tournaments,
and which I have not been able to port with Wine.

So I need to urgently do one of the following:

* Find a charger that can handle 19V, 3.43 amperes, and has the 
  right
  shape and polarity.

* Find someone who has experience "lifting" a Windows installation 
  into
  a VM to run on a GNU/Linux system.  It would have to preserve 
  the CPU
  id or whatever mechanism this s/w uses to node-lock.

* Do a new installation of a Windows VM and get the new s/w on 
  there -
  would have to happen very quickly on Friday morning, and might 
  still
  fail.  Has anyone ever installed Windows into a VM and can guide 
  me
  through it?  That is the solution for the medium term because I 
  don't
  want to have a Windows laptop for chess tournaments.

Anyone have ideas?