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Virtual PC 2004 continues to rock my world...

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Just a quick note to developers who have not yet discovered Virtual PC 2004...do it now!

I continue to be amazed by this product and how it has transformed my daily work experience.

I'm able to have multiple Whidbey builds, multiple operating systems and even guaranteed-isolated-from-the-network-and-my-real-hard-disk environments. No longer do I have to risk my real machine to test a piece of shareware. No longer do I need to say, "drat, I'm running XP and I need to test this on IIS6 (which only runs on Win2k3)". I'm blessed to have a machine that has 2Gb of ram so I can run 3 512Mb VPCs simultaneously, all without swapping.

But most important of all: IT RUNS AS FAST AS THE REAL MACHINE! And this is on a LAPTOP not some QUAD XEON.

I know there must be a bit of a slowdown to translate file system calls into file access calls but everything is so fast that I have found myself in situations where I had a VPC in full-screen mode and started hunting for one of my "normal" applications only to discover that I was in a VPC and forgot it wasn't the real deal.

If you have an MSDN subscription, you can download it from Subscriber Downloads.

And one final note: If you do have an MSDN subscription, you've got to subscribe to the download notifications via RSS. In my previous life, as Director of Engineering for a small (20+ devs) ISV, I had an opportunity to be on a panel at the last PDC in which the MSDN folks were asking customers how to better provide MSDN content. I was very insistent that I wanted up-to-the-minute notification when new content was available. I wish I'd been a blogger then, I would have suggested using RSS! Nice to know someone was listening!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 15, 2005
    Qemu allows for multiple machine emulation and it is free!!

    http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/
    qemu/links.html
  • Anonymous
    March 15, 2005
    We have seen just the opposite since Microsoft took over development. Are you using the latest version? All of our developers here have HT machines with 1GB mem. The new Virtual PC is so slow that we have reverted back to the original VPC (Connectix V5.x). We have also had to drop back to V5.x for Linux support since it was dropped in the Microsoft version.

    The 5.x version is great, I was doing some pretty intense distributed tests all on one machine (simulating 3). Simply amazing.

    Perhaps you have not compared the newer version to 5.x. I would be interested to find out what you report on this. I'd like for all our engineers to be on the latest.

    (BTW, I am NOT a Microsoft-basher, I a very pro-Microsoft, I am, however, bound by the constraints of reality...)

    Thanks,

    -=Glen=-

    Glen A. Sansoucie
    Chief Technical Architect
    Loftware, Inc.

    glens@loftware.com

  • Anonymous
    March 16, 2005
    R: I've not heard of Qemu, I'll have to check it out...always on the lookout for interesting technology.

    Glen: I was not a user prior to joining Microsoft so I can't speak to the 5.x version but I will make some inquiries and see what info I can gather.
  • Anonymous
    March 16, 2005
    Hi Glen -

    What guest operating systems are you running inside of Virtual PC? Also - did you install the latest Virtual Machine Additions?

    Cheers,
    Ben
  • Anonymous
    May 26, 2009
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