But he remembered his friend’s advice: “Always go to the official source. Look for the .com.”

The download was large—around 300MB—so he grabbed a coffee. When he returned, the installer was ready.

He clicked "Create," pointed it to a free Ubuntu ISO he’d downloaded earlier, and followed the prompts. The Player asked a few basic questions: name, disk size (he gave it 25GB), and memory (4GB). It even auto-detected the OS.

He closed the VM, shut his laptop, and slept well. Tomorrow, he’d try installing Windows 98—just for fun.

The installation was smooth, but Leo hit one small snag: a checkbox during setup asked if he wanted to install "Enhanced Keyboard Driver." He almost unchecked it (never trust extra drivers, right?), but a quick tooltip explained it helped with international keyboards and gaming inside the VM. He left it checked.

One evening, staring at a failed dual-boot attempt (and a very grumpy bootloader), he muttered, "There has to be a safer way."

The first three results were ad-laden "driver update" sites and a confusing "VMware Workstation Pro" page with a hefty price tag. He almost gave up. "Free? Yeah, right," he grumbled.