Has anyone tried Vista with Virtual PC?

[rheartis]

I have recently completed building a new pc and have the hardware that can support vista, but I'm not sure about peripherals (printer, label maker, etc).

I've installed XP and was thinking I could install Virtual PC 2004 and install a copy of Vista. The Microsoft support docs I've found only lists the XP and pre-XP operating systems as compatible, but the docs could be older.

Has anyone tried installing Vista as a Virtual PC?

Thanks!

 

[Digitalfiends]

Download Virtual Server 2005 R2 (it's free):
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6DBA2278-B022-4F56-AF96-7B95975DB13B&displaylang=en

Then get a hold of the SP1 beta from Microsoft Connect. That will allow you to run a virtual copy of Vista.

 

[rheartis]

Excellent! I will give that a try.

Thanks for your help!

 

[heinekenn]

vmware works too.

 

[Nonymous]

Yes, it runs under Virtual PC 2004.

When creating the virtual machine, you have to pick "Other" for the OS. I've heard that picking Windows Server 2003 as the OS also works, but I've never tried that.

Because of "Other", it will run pretty slow. VPC is much faster when you can create and use a virtual machine for an OS that VPC has built in and optimized support for.

I myself had a beta of Vista running on VPC a few months ago. It wasn't really usable for me, due to slowness, IMO. Things like double clicking on Control Panel and it finally starts to come up 5 seconds later. Probably I was getting hit with a double whammy... slow because of all the debug code in that beta build of Vista, and slow because of running an "Other" virtual machine. I had plenty of memory.

A friend at work has vista RTM running on VPC and he has much better performance that what I had. It was much more usable, but was still slow enough that wouldn't want to use it was on a constant daily basis.; I dont have the patience. He doesn't seem to mind. Guess it's all what you're used to. And for him (who's never owned a nice new PC), it's also a matter of not knowing what he's missing.

I'd look at VMWare. I have less experience with it but from what I've seen, it runs circles around Virtual PC when it comes to performance.

btw, Virtual PC 2007 is out in Beta. It has support for Vista. I've heard it has much better performance than 2004.

 

[Digitalfiends]

What's wrong with Virtual Server 2005 R2?