Reader Comments

Yawn. The x86 version of Virtual PC was almost never used by anyone except for Microsoft zealots who get off running Win95 in a VM or archival purposes, and Linux wannabe's who want to leave Windows behind for Linux but won't because of The Sims. The PowerPC version of Virtual PC was the version heavily used. But, alas, Apple pwnd Microsoft by switching to x86. Now all they have is an application that's sub-par for runnning Windows solutions on a Mac. Parallels and VMWare will always rule this market.

vandil, I hate to chime in, but you really don't know what you're talking about here. Your revisionist take on the history of Virtual PC is hilariously ill-informed. Here's a clue for you: Microsoft's interest in Virtual PC had virtually (no pun intended) nothing to do with the PowerPC version.

VMWare isn't free. Now, I'll admit, Virtual PC is a very bad idea. Its nice that they made it free, because the only people who are going to use it are those on a smaller scale. For app testing and whatnot. VMWare is a degree of virtualization that impresses me to this day. You can set up a vmware cluster and migrate, a live OS (handling requests over a network) from one piece of hardware to another. Virtual PC can't do that. But again VMware costs... well, ALOT. But it does truely amazing things. I'm glad for MS and their emulator venture, I'll get to play with other OS's w/o rebooting. But thats mostly what this is, a toy.

"I'm glad for MS and their emulator venture, I'll get to play with other OS's w/o rebooting. But thats mostly what this is, a toy." Its not a toy. Its great for testing setups and environments and I can do it for free. Quite nice when you have a million consultants/shareware developers.

Also, with Vista, because of the new "Generalize" feature of Sysprep, you can now setup and test your config set in a virtual machine rather than building a "Master Computer", and then deploy on actual hardware after the fact. That's just good stuff for system builders. Consolidate your "Technician Computer" and "Master Computer" into one machine for testing the environment. Good show Microsoft! After having a couple days to play around with the new OPK for Vista, I realize that it's VASTLY superior to XP's OPK process. Why, the hardware generalization feature alone is worth it's weight in gold! (how do you weigh something that's digital anyway?) No more creating numerous config sets (or images) for all different hardware! Also, since Vista editions are all product-key based, you can build your config set on Vista Ultimate's catalog, and after resealing, when the user is prompted for their product key, they'll only unlock the features appropriate to the version that they bought! That means that you don't have to create a separate machine image for each Vista edition! More good stuff! (I'm excited, and you can tell cuz I used a lot of "!"'s - I don't want to go back to deploying machines with XP's OPK anymore...)

@will84 "VMWare isn't free." I'll assume you haven't look into VMware server: their free VM solution! It's a complete (inc. x64 guest compatibility) solution with all the newest technology in virtualization! They even provide "ready-to-go" drive images for people to tryout new OSs and solutions without the need to go through the whole instalation process... Now, that's marketing ;) ch33rs m8s, ~Levi F.

It's interesting seeing all the comments about Virtualisation products - as pretty much everyone is getting it wrong. Virtual PC is a workstation targetted virtualisation product, it is by no means a toy, but the current shipping version does not compare favourably with VMWare Workstation IMHO - VMware is faster, and has more features. Maybe Virtual PC 2007 will change things - I haven't looked at the beta yet. Some people are commenting about the power of VMware's clustering technology - that's an entirely different product, and the really killer features of VMware's server oriented systems are not available in the free version. Again, VMWare's virtual infrastructure suite bests Microsoft's Virtual Server technology in many areas. Microsoft are still playing catch up in the virtualisation world - but the aggresive approach Microsoft are taking leads me to draw two conclusions: 1 - Microsoft will push very hard to quickly catch up technologically with VMware 2 - if they suceed, and dominate the market, VMware is sure to mount lawsuits against Microsoft's 'have it all for free' approach.