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 Home > Views & Reviews > Virtual PC |
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Virtual PC from Connectix  is a PC emulator. It allows you to run virtual PCs under Windows.
Before I start covering details of what exactly Virtual PC does and how it works, I'd like to cover my reservations about emulation. I've had a couple of products in the past that attempted various levels of emulation... The first was a Gravis Ultrasound (GUS) sound card, which I owned back in the days when DOS was king. The GUS was a great card, but it used a DOS TSR called SBOS to emulate a Soundblaster. SBOS would just about work on the least demanding tasks, but for games it was useless. SBOS started my waryness of emulation. Some years later, I bought a product called Bleem! which claimed to emulate a Playstation under Windows. Bleem! would work reasonably well for older games, but anything newer - and therefore more demanding of the Playstation hardware - just plain didn't work. My view of any kind of emulation was somewhat tarnished at this point. So, it was with a raised eyebrow that I read a recent review of Virtual PC for Windows in PC Pro
magazine. The verdict in the review was that Virtual PC worked - and worked well. It worked
so well for the reviewer, in fact, that they awarded it the rare PC Pro "Excellence"
award. That got my attention, so I visited the Connectix site to find a U.K distributor to buy
a copy. That was a saga in itself and, to cut a long story short, the companies listed for the
U.K have not even replied to my queries. Anyway, I purchased a copy on-line for download. 30
minutes later, I had it downloaded, installed and ready to 'boot' my first virtual PC.
I then went through the wizard to create a new PC (and virtual hard disk) and moments later had a new entry in the main Virtual PC window. I went for it... I clicked the Start Up button, a window appeared, my floppy drive rattled and I was presented with the following: 
Look familiar? This is what you would see if you booted a PC with a blank hard disk and no boot floppy.  I had recently downloaded Redhat Linux v7.2, for which I had 2 650Mb ISO CD images sitting on my
Windows XP desktop, so I 'mounted' Disk 1 using the CD icon at the bottom-left of the Virtual PC window
and Reset the PC. It instantly (no BIOS checks, memory counts, etc.) switched to the Redhat
installer and I was away; I partitioned the disk in the usual way for Linux, selected my install
options and let it rattle away performing the install (mounting the Disk 2 ISO when prompted).
When it was complete, the installer wanted to reboot. I unmounted the virtual CD and hit Next.
The virtual PC instantly booted to Linux and I had my first OS up and running. I configured
Linux for the virtual Soundblaster 16 on the usual interrupts and virtual Intel PCI NIC and was
done in under an hour.
Very impressive. So, what else can it handle? At the time of writing, I've created virtual PCs running:
So, what good is Virtual PC? What uses does it have? Well, I'll give two examples, each with my different 'hats' on... As a Web developer, I need to check that my content looks right on various different platforms and browsers. Generally, it's pretty hard to get Windows to allow numerous versions of browsers to be installed at the same time (for example, Internet Explorer 3, 4, 5, 5.5 & 6 or Netscape Navigator 3, 4, 6.x, etc.). With Virtual PC, I can achieve this; I'll have Windows 95 running versions that were around when it was released; Windows 98 with newer versions and my main Windows XP desktop running the latest versions. With Virtual PC, I can also test the popular browsers under Linux too. As a software developer, I need to test my applications on different versions of Windows, and it's easy to see that it's possible to boot multiple versions. However, better still, Virtual PC supports a roll-back feature allowing me to badly break installation, then Undo back to a set point. While I don't do such things as NetWare NLM development, I could see this as a classic example where your development testing could cause the 'server' to hang badly, and Virtual PC would allow you to simply kill the dead machine and reboot it quickly and easily. One other thing I'm going to try soon is Virtual PC's ability to have a machine use a hard disk that is in fact a separate partition on the disk. My reason is this... I want to upgrade a machine from Windows 98 SE to Windows XP Home Edition, but I'm leaning towards a clean install, rather than upgrading the existing installation. Why? Well, as we all know, Windows grows slower over time, as new software is installed (and perhaps uninstalled leaving crap behind in the Registry, etc.). The Windows 98 installation in question is years old; a Windows 95 original install, since upgraded to Windows 98 and then 98 SE. It hasn't been re-installed in years and is very slow and cluttered. So, I'm thinking I'll install XP clean then install Virtual PC in such a way that I can boot up my old Windows 98 machine in a window in order to drag files and settings across to the new one. More on that in a separate 'article' probably... In closing, I love Virtual PC; if not only for the fact that I can get rid of the pile of base units currently sitting next to my desk - which was previously how I booted multiple Operating Systems... |
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