Microsoft Virtual PC thingy

Craig321

Craig321

Craig321

Soldato
Joined
2 May 2004
Posts
19,950
Hi,

I've used this before, but only briefly.

If I installed say.... Windows Vista Beta 2 onto virtual PC will it mess with my main O/S at all? Or will it just basically install itself into an image type thing on my hard drive?

Thanks,
Craig.
 
Last edited:
It wont harm anything, the 'machine' only exists in memory :)

Get VMWare Server though, it rocks all over Virtual Server. Microsoft are very much on the back foot with virtualisation.

Until Longhorn Server comes out anyway.
 
You fire up VMware, it then runs in the console,

In terms of resource I run 2 copies of 2003 server with 256MB of ram each with no problems on a 1GB Pc with a Athlon 2.8 CPU.
 
The bottleneck on a common desktop is disk I/O really. 3+ virtual machines running, or a couple running I/O heavy apps and your whole system will suffer.
 
I often use the VMWare workstation product. The more RAM you have will help... But as above the more machines you run, your resources are pushed. I can get a way with running 3 possibly 4 machines at a time if needed.... mainly ubuntu and vista beta 2 at the moment..
 
vmware server can create virtual machines and manage a single snapshot of them, vmware player can only start existing ones.
 
Ah, okay. Thanks.
So this VMWare doesn't go anywhere near your main PC, it just installs the OS into an image type thing like MS Virtual thing does?
 
Aye :) You can give it direct access to a hard disk if you want to, but it's not the default and even then it cant be your system partition. Default will give you a disk 'file'.
 
how does it run vista? Last time i loaded up vmware workstation (version 4 i think) it didnt support directx. Does glass work under a virtual server.
 
Snapshot it and try it :p Never tried it tbh. Not sure if the virtual hardware is DX compliant.

In any case you'll need vmware tools installed on the guest I'd think.
 
:eek: VMWare almost gave me a heart attack, I made a new virtual machine and it then asked me for the CD-Key for the program, so I went to email and it gave me a warning that it couldn't access the personal folders (these are stored on my external).

I then checked on my external and could get in but all the folder icons had reset themselves (I spent quite a bit of time making it look pretty). So I rebooted.

When the PC started back up the external wasn't there, that was the point when I almost had a heart attack :p

I found out it was because VMWare had disabled autorun even though I told it not to :(

How do I turn autorun back on please?

[Edit]
Just noticed it isn't disabled, not sure what was going on with my external, all seems fine now though :)

[Edit again]
I just started to install Win 2000 Pro as a test and it said something about the disk being imcompatable at the moment and if I want to continue the install then all data on the startup disk will be lost. It's a bit scary it saying to me that all data on startup disk will be lost, will it just 'format' the virtual drive thingy?

Thanks,
Craig.
 
Last edited:
Otacon said:
Yeah, no need to worry :)
Click to expand...

Thanks for your help :)

[Edit]
Any idea why it might have stopped here?:

1150216664stop.png
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom