MS Virtual PC usage question

[mcseguy9]

I'm curious to know if there is any benefit to my using Virtual PC at home. I own a few PC's, two of which are my daughter's. I know that you can use VPC as a test bed, for deployment purposes, etc. Would there be any benefit to my using it at home, perhaps on my girl's PC's or even mine? I'm trying to figure this out and haven't come to any conclusion yet. Let me know your thoughts.

[liam858]

You can test betas on a test OS on VPC, and test out different operating systems without having to install them on the host machine, as well as server OS, and with the new version (2007) you can install Vista on it, as well as x64 versions of XP and Vista, it's also compatible with Vista.


Liam

[LindaHewitt]

The biggest benefit, IMO, is that it allows you to test new software, and if your test or the software crashes your VM, it will not crash the host computer.

You do need to make sure that your computer has sufficient RAM, because you will need to pre-define how much RAM, you want to designate for each VM (Virtual Machine).

This would be a great way to try out new operating systems, such as Linux or Vista or Windows Server 2003.

Virtual PC is free, so the price is right.

If you are running XP or W2K, then the minimum RAM that you should have on the computer is 1 GB. I am running W2K with 512 MB RAM and I set up a VM to run the beta version of Office 2003 before it was released. I needed to do this to complete a project, which was based on Office 2003. This was a safe way to do that without messing up my primary system.

Cheers,

Linda