Recently, Vincent has left a new comment on the post "Reader Questions":
Re: Your comment about the preference for Vista Biz to run VM's. I was wondering what VM's you're running? I've been using Sun's Virtual Box in VHome Premium and it seems to run everything (mostly linux distros) well.
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First, to get us all on the same page, a definition: Virtual machine. And here's an ancient article I wrote on the technology.
I use the free Microsoft Virtual PC because it works fine, is easy to set up, is free, and, well, because of inertia. I have many, many VMs set up on disk, ready to be activated as needed. I actually have every version of Windows on VM all the way back to Windows 3.0.
Mostly I use it to test things on versions of an OS that I'm not currently using. If I'm answering a question about, say, XP, but I'm running Vista, it's very handy to have a complete, for-real XP installation running inside a Vista window.
It's also good for "I wonder what will happen if..." experiments. I'll clone a VM and run my nefarious tests on it. If I blow up the software, so what? Exit and delete the mangled VM, make a fresh copy, start over. Elapsed time: a minute or two. No laborious rebuilding of a system or trying to get things back they way they were.
VMware makes an excellent VM system too, although in all but its most basic and limited form, you have to pay for it. It's really intended for commercial deployment.
And there are others, too, as Vince alludes to. (EG http://www.virtualbox.org/ )
Very cool tech!
I have used VMWare and Virtual PC at work in the past and liked both of them. Recently I needed a WinXP machine at home to run some software (that wasn't capable with Vista 64-bit) and tried the free Virtual PC 2007. Unfortunately it doesn't support USB, which is pretty prevalent nowadays. I tried Virtualbox because I read it did support USB. It was just as easy to install OS's as Virtual PC and the USB works flawlessly.
ReplyDeleteI agree. I find Microsoft's product limited. Besides the USB issue, I had a devil of a time getting sound in Vista Ultimate. When I finally did discover how to enable it, it was so low it was hardly worth the effort I had applied.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with Fred's comments regarding VMWare. It will play programs made available by the the manufacturer but if you want to branch out you're stuck.
Fred,
ReplyDeleteJust downloaded and installed MS VirtualPC 2007. I picked it as a starting point based on this post...
Thanks! This thing is amazing!
Jim
Glad you like it.
ReplyDeleteBefore you commit, give Sun's free VirtualBox a try, too. Each has strengths and weaknesses, but they're both good and are worth looking at before you invest a lot of time in one or the other.
The main thing now seems to be that MS's offering is sort of on autopilot--- suffering benign corporate neglect from MS--- while Virtualbox is showing signs of ongoing active development.
But they both work, so there's no "wrong" decision. :)