My hands-on with Virtual PC 2007

Virtualization - that seems to be quite a buzzword these days with most modern processors supporting it natively. I was a bit intrigued. Ofcourse, I knew the meaning of Virtualization but I wanted to get some hands on info on it. I recently installed Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 on my computer (C2D E6550, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD, Vista Home Premium) and tried to install Windows XP on it.

Installation
The install of a guest OS went off without a hitch - all I had to do was mount my Windows XP disc image and the Virtual PC launched the regular Windows XP setup routine (which admittedly, went off rather quickly). Soon enough, I was staring at the Windows XP billboards. No difference in terms of installation - everything was as expected.

Usage
Once the setup procedure was done and the OS booted to the desktop, first thing I did was to check the Device Manager - the Virtual PC was one of the older Intel 440ZX based isystems with a SoundBlaster 16 sound card and an S3 Trio video card with 8MB VRAM. I suppose the older hardware is to provide compatibility with older OSes like Windows 98. Interms of performance, however, I did not notice any performance lags, a nice deal.

I next tried to install a couple of old games like Half Life on this Virtual PC - for some reason, it would not accept my product key. I then tried a few older DOS games like paratrooper, Prince of Persia, Test Drive 2 and the like - all of these worked just fine. The only think I found annoying was the fact that the Virtual PC would reproduct all system speaker beeps using my desktop speakers - really annoying if you're playing games which use that tiny PC speaker to reproduce game sounds.

I had a few MP3s on my host OS and wanted to see how they would sound on the Virtual PC. Microsoft Virtual PC allows you to share folders in the host OS with the Virtual PC. These shared folders appear as Network Drives in the My Computer window. For some weird reason, I was able to browse to the location of my MP3s but when I double clicked on them to play them, I got an error that the file could not be found. I was able to copy the files to the Virtual PCs hard drive and play them just fine from there. Glitch? Me thinks so.

I then tried to install Vista on the Virtual Machine after allocating half of my physical RAM for it. It installed without a hitch but performance wasn't up to the mark - I guess I'll have to wait for my next system with Vista x64 and 8GB RAM before I try a Vista-in-Vista setup. However, one thing I did notice was that the SoundBlaster16 did not get installed in Vista. I was not able to check sound in Vista. I'm keeping my eyes open on a VIsta compatible SoundBlaster16 driver.

Conclusion
Though I haven't tried to install too many Operating Systems on Microsoft Virtual PC, what I have seen so far points at a very robust platform for anyone willing to try out Virtual PC concepts. It should be prudent for corporates who wish to test a few systems with their software before deploying the product across the enterprise. I'll keep working on it and will post any new developments.