Heads up for Vista users: Virtual PC 2007

meglamaniac

meglamaniac

meglamaniac

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Microsoft will shortly be releasing Virtual PC 2007, for free.
Virtual PC, as the name suggests, uses virtualisation to allow you to run a second PC in software on the host operating system.

Why is this useful?
Well if one of your favourite programs isn't working with Vista and hasn't been updated yet, you can use VPC to run a copy of Windows XP from within Vista. All you need is your XP CD (and CD-Key obviously).

As its in beta it's not currently available easily.
However, you can go here...

https://connect.microsoft.com/programdetails.aspx?ProgramDetailsID=874

...and sign up, although you'll need a Passport which most of you already have if you use hotmail. This gets you immediate access to VPC Release Candidate (i.e. the final test version before it gets released to the public) which is running fine on my copy of Vista Ultimate right now.

This is handy for me because Adobe CS2 has been giving me all sorts of issues so until Adobe sort it out I can run XP in VPC 2007 without having to dual boot!

Hope this is helpful.
 
Thanks for the info. I have a few Win 95/98 games that won't work in Vista so I'll give this a try and hopefully be able to install Win 98. :)
 
Virtual PC 2007 finall is out - I've installed WinXP onto it and am in the middle of doing all the SP2/windows update bits.

From what I can see so far it beats the hell out of having a dual-boot installation, but I'll reserve full comment until I try installing any non-Vista compatible games onto it ;)
 
You can allocate a certain amount of your system RAM to whichever OS you install on the Virtual PC, and by default it also creates a virtual HDD for the OS to be installed on - again, something you can make as large as you like within the limitations of your physical PC's hardware.

You still need to install applications onto the Virtual PC much in the same way that you would if you were dual-booting but - and here's the clever part - if you're running your Virtual PC in either a windowed state or as a multi-monitor app, you can drag and drop files from your Virtual PC onto your physical PC's desktop ;)

Oh, I should also add that you can have several virtual PC's installed on your system - each running a different OS right back to MS-DOS, if you so choose - and you could run each Virtual PC at the same time if needed.

Pop over to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/default.mspx
to find more and to download the software (30MB)
 
Virtual PC 2007 is NOT designed for gaming!

Okay, I've peeked a bit further under the hood of Virtual PC 2007 and can say that it's not designed to handle games.

What MS have done is create a virtual platform for installing OS's that will allow you to run the majority of legacy applications on that OS, but the virtual PC doesn't permit any HAL access to things such as your physical PC's graphics card or sound card; rather it "installs" baseline compatible virtual hardware that will run using your PC's resources

This is perhaps better explained by the following screenshot I tarted up

virtualPC.jpg


You'll see here that I'm running a Virtual PC with Windows XP SP2 installed, and my Vista desktop is visible in the background. Whilst the Virtual PC correctly reports my E6600 processor, and the 1GB of my system RAM I've allocated to it, it has created a virtual S3 Trio graphics adapter... perfect for running legacy applications that don't need 3D acceleration - but completely useless for gaming!

Whilst running Virtual PC 2007 may be a stopgap solution for folks whom have critical applications that aren't currently working on Vista, everything that I need to use on a day-to-day basis is working perfectly on Vista Ultimate x64.... so I've just wasted a few hours installing XP SP2 for no good reason :eek:

Still - it's been less painful than creating a dual-boot system and it may yet have its uses... probably with very old games that don't need/use 3D acceleration (C&C, anyone?) and there's a few select websites which use Java that make crash IE7 under Vista.
 
marc2003 said:
well there's no directx/3d acceleration so don't get your hopes up.... ;)
Click to expand...
Aye. Although Microsoft plans to solve that with WDDM 3.0. See here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/b/9/5b97017b-e28a-4bae-ba48-174cf47d23cd/PRI103_WH06.ppt (Powerpoint presentation) So then Windows will be the first OS to support a hardware accelerated desktop through a virtualised machine
icon14.gif


I've got a feeling that the WDDM roadmap in that presentation will unfold along side DirectX. So like DX10.5 (or whatever the next version is) will probably have WDDM 2.0.

PS: WDDM is reason #1 why DX10 isn't being backported to XP.

TheMadScot said:
and can say that it's not designed to handle games.
Click to expand...
That's not really the fault of Virtual PC per se. It just isn't supported by any OS at this time. See above though.
 
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I'm sure they will beat them to it but who in the world would actually care? :p

If OSX, Redhat or Suse do it first then I'll eat my hat. Those operating systems have got a lot of catching up to do just to reach a WDDM 1.0 equivilent feature set.
 
I'm sure they will beat them to it but who in the world would actually care?
Click to expand...

I'd care :( <sob sob>

On a serious note I agree with your last point, although I'm positive some Xen dev build must almost be there, what with the already pretty good para-virtualisation. Parallels are definately working on this at the moment, I'm looking forward to running Vista (with Aero hopefully) on a VM on the Mac.
 
virtualbox works a lot quicker, windows installs fly by in this!

http://www.virtualbox.org/


-virtual machines are made as testing environments, dual-booting is a lot better for anyone thinking of using it as a gaming environment


vbox isn't as feature packed at the moment as vpc, but its still in early stages, its the only 'virtual' pc i use now, does everything i want it to
 
Although this works very well (except for aweful mouse lag) under x64 it hasn't bridged my network connection correctly and now it has no net :mad: Its still an excellent piece of sfotware, if this would work.
 
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