Always use disk image files! You'll want WinImage for making floppy images, and something like LC ISO Creator for creating CD/DVD ISO images. Why did they choose to emulate these particular devices? Compatibility.Īlso, VirtualPC is slow enough as-is without torturing yourself with physical floppies or CDs. Host CPU is equal to your physical CPU, obviously. When installing operating systems, it's important to know exactly which devices Virtual PC emulates: The CPU, memory, and network performance is respectable- the biggest performance problems in Virtual PC are caused by the slow emulated disk and video subsystems. These percentages jibe with the Virtual PC benchmarks I found. The emulated video hardware is also substantially slower than a native device, but is typically less of a bottleneck in real world usage (well, until Longhorn, but let's not go there right now). Oddly, video performance is not mentioned there. If these guys start paging to disk, you'll be in a world of hurt. This also means you never, ever want to starve your VMs for memory. I use dynamically expanding disk images for flexibility, but it might be worth experimenting with fixed-size disk images, dedicating a seperate drive to VPC, or even the oddball physical drive mapping mode (see the VirtualPC FAQ) to get around that bottleneck. Some interesting comments on performance targets:Įvidently, emulated disk performance is terrible. Scott Hanselman has some great Virtual PC performance tips direct from Microsoft. Plan for at least two hours for any OS install, and possibly many more.Įven if you have fire-breathing PC hardware- and any self-respecting developer should, because time is money, and PCs are cheap these days- you'll be disappointed with Virtual PC performance. Although performance is decent once you get the OS up and running, the OS installs themselves can be downright brutal. This is the price we pay for the flexibility of virtualized hardware. The biggest bugaboo is, of course, performance. If you start delving into VPC, I highly recommend reading through the excellent Virtual PC FAQ. Since the last time I discussed VPC, Microsoft released the essential Virtual PC 2004 Service Pack 1, which addresses a lot of outstanding issues, particularly compatibility with SP2 and newer AMD/Intel processors. Nice.I'm working with Microsoft's Virtual PC 2004 again. Not as elegant as the seamless integration we have for newer operating systems, but at least it brings the experience back to what it used to be. It turns out it brings back the mouse integration, so no more fancy keyboard combinations to escape from the mouse capture. Windows Virtual PC (successor to Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, Microsoft Virtual PC 2004, and Connectix Virtual PC) is a virtualization program for Microsoft. The Virtual PC additions don’t work so hot.ĭiscussing how to pull the old Virtual PC 2004 additions for use in DOS, and wondered – what would the ISO for the Windows VPC additions from VPC 2004 do for my Windows 2000 VPCs? While Windows XP and Windows Vista have fairly robust support in Some of them I keep around for fun (occasionally I get a laugh from the old-timers when I pull out a copy of Microsoft Bob on Windows 95), but I try to maintain copies of Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista that are fairly up-to-date because I have worked with customers who have each. I keep copies of various older Microsoft operating systems around. A helpful tip I figured I would pass along…
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