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Virtual PC – get it, it rocks!

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I simply could not even start to get ready for the demo’s on Monday without the help of Virtual PC (and if I keep bogging I won’t get them done in any case J).

What is Virtual PC: it allows you to run up another instance of a PC on your desktop in a window much like it was an application. This PC for all intensive purposes behaves like a totally separate machine. However, you can optionally share resources such as networks and disks.

It’s a huge timesaver as you can set up different PC’s for each demo and to also have them start at a known state (there is a nice feature called difference drives that allows you to roll back or accept any changes you made since you last booted up).

Admittedly you do need a reasonable specification machine to run Virtual PC the key factor is that you need enough memory in your PC to support both the host and guest operating system(s).

As I write this I’m on my desktop which is pretty beefy, it has 2GB of Ram – I’m running Windows XP as my host (bootable) OS and I have 3 Virtual PC sessions open

  1. Visual Studio 2005 Web Developer on Windows XP
  2. Visual Studio 2005 Team Studio on Windows XP
  3. Visual Studio 2005 Team System Foundation Server on Windows Server 2003

Why? Because I can I guess J

 

I think the truth is howeevr that I’m being pretty unstructured in getting the stuff working and comparing some features across the builds. The machines running like a dream with memory left spare and a lot of CPU idle time.

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