Rich's Ramblings for October 2004



Microsoft's Virtual PC has been taking up entirely too much of my time lately. I felt that I was missing something on my computer with only one Operating System. I had been reading some information about Virtual Computer software so I decided to take the plunge. Microsoft's Virtual PC retails for about $125 and in my opinion, it is worth it. It was almost too easy to install on my laptop with the 60Gigabyte Hard disk and 512Megabytes of RAM.



You ask what is VPC? Here is a quote from the Microsoft Frequently Asked Questions.



Q. What is Microsoft Virtual PC for Windows?

A. Microsoft Virtual PC for Windows is a client based software virtualization application that allows you to simultaneously run multiple operating systems on a single PC. Each virtual machine emulates a complete hardware system-from processor to network card-in a self-contained, isolated software environment, enabling the simultaneous operation of otherwise incompatible systems."

1. I installed the VPC in about 10 minutes and was up an running with a Virtual disk for Windows 2000 professional. I had an extra copy of w2k pro that I had laying around for a while and it finally came in handy. Microsoft's VPC comes with all the drivers for their Virtual Operating systems to be able to have video, hard disk, mice, cd-roms and network adapter drivers for the Host system.. Windows 2000 installed without a hitch and frankly it scared me how easy it was. I wanted to test a couple of programs under windows 2000 and this is the tool. Support for USB and SCSI is not there, yet and the Video emulation is only the S3 Trio 64. Standard MS mice are there. DVD's are not basically supported. If you have a DVD drive, VPC will read data from it but not play video's and such.

It just works.





2. Feeling frisky, I felt that it was time to byte the bullet and install Windows 98 Second Edition. It is a good thing that I had a windows98 boot disk around as I ended up running the disk partitioning software DOS's FDISK to partition the virtual hard disk and then had to format the disk. This has no effect on my host systems Windows XP Pro hard disk formatted with NTFS.



Each VPC consists of a hard disk which is a file on your host hard disk. It acts exactly like your host machine as far as bios and configuration is concerned. I was a bit worried at first but most of you know me, I am fearless and ran FDISK, partitioned the "hard disk" and set the partition active. Rebooting and then typing FORMAT C:/S. I was worried but I could see that my host XP system in the background was still perking along and the format went fine. I had a 2 gigabyte virtual hard disk so I copied the Windows 98 SE files from the CD-ROM drive's \win98 sub directory to a sub directory on the "virtual hard disk" in the \win98 sub directory. ( I have been doing this for many years as it makes installation of windows 98 so much smoother. Also changes or modifications to your windows98 OS, no longer asks for you to insert the system cd-rom.) I then changed to the \win98 subdirectory and ran setup. Everything worked as if I had installed W98 on a new hard disk. Windows found the sound card, video card and the network adapter. I just plain worked as expected.







After installing windows 2000 professional, the properties of "my computer" looked like this.



After installing windows98 second edition, this is what the properties of my computer looks like..



After installing Dos 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11, this is what the Windows 3.11 screen looks like..



Here is a capture screen of what the control panel looks like for the Virtual PC when I have the DOS, w2k and the windows 98/se sessions running but minimized.





all in all, I like the program. (As you could probably guess)



Microsofts Virtual PC 2004

MSRP $125

Web site for you to take a look at what is available.



Http://www.microsoft.com/virtualpc



I will be glad to report back more as I go thru testing. As a consequence of installing the VPC, I upgraded my memory to 1 gigabyte on my laptop and now I can run all 4 Operating systems at the same time. Switching between them is pretty scary but impressive.



Rich Schinnell has been a member of cpcug since day one and has volunteered for well over 20 years. He has a web page at schinnell.org and can be reached at schinnel@cpcug.org. His columns have been running in the Monitor for the past 15 years..