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Microsoft Virtual PC DescriptionMicrosoft Virtual PC Description
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Description of this program that allows a single machine, running Windows XP Pro, or Windows 2000+, to have one or more virtual computers running other operating systems, all at the same time.
Subjects > Computers (Search) > Software (Search for Software) > Microsoft Virtual PC (Search for Virtual PC)
Virtual PC is great. You can use it to run Linux in a window on your Windows desktop. You can of course also install other versions of windows, dos, etc. I've got a virtual PC for windows 2003 advanced server that runs in a windows on the desktop of my Windows XP machine. The catch is that Windows 2003 wants 256MB ram, so when I run it, it was chewing up 1/2 of my 512MB of ram. I just upgraded this laptop to 1 gig of ram yesterday, so that should be less of a problem.... I put a linux in a 64MB area, and I think also some other early versions of windows like 95 and 98 in their own boxes.... Now with my extra ram, I could run several different virtual PC sessions at the same time, each being a different operating system.
Fun thing is that when you use this, you start up one of the virtual pc windows, and you see a window on your machine that goes through a full boot up sequence. you can see it checking hardware, you can even go into the bios! of the virtual machine The bios will be a copy of AMI bios that comes with virtual PC, not the real bios of your machine. It's part of the fake, virtual, machine that is created for the OS to run in. The virtual PC's (guest OS) running on your machine (the host), fully believe they are on their own dedicated machine. If you install XP, or Win2003 in a guest OS box, it'll complain that it wants to be activated. You can mount ISO disk images in the guest OS, and they show up like extra CDROM letters. There is no need to repartition, each guest OS lives in it's own virtual disk file that grows dynamically to be whatever size is required to store the contents of the disk drive that the guest OS sees. When you start installing the OS, it'll think it has something like a 15GB drive to play with, (you can even fdisk and format this virtual drive from within the guest OS), but the actual file on your host PC will only be a bit bigger than the total amount of data you put in it. These virtual hard drives can be disconnected from a given guest OS and hooked up to different guest OS. You could even back up the .VHD from your host machine to keep a copy of a certain configuration, or move them between physical host machines. The guest OS can capture your CDROM drive so that bootable CDs, and CD autoruns, and stuff like that all happens within the guest PC, not your host. The guest OS gets it's own IP address from your network adapter, have entirely it's own set of programs installed separate from your host, and live, crash, die, hibernate, reboot, all within it's box, with out disturbing your host PC.
Draw backs? Well, of course you're splitting your machines attention among multiple things so everything is slower if the guest or the host are very busy. But in practice it's not a big deal. The only time you really notice it is when you are installing OSs in the guest PCs, that takes longer than doing it on your physical machine.
Check out [Facts About Trees]
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