What Is A Virtual PC?

I got my first Microsoft Certification back in 2000. In those days, in order to run more than one operating system on the same machine, we would have to partition our hard drives and then install the operating system on the new partition. This was commonly referred to as a dual boot system. Tools such as Partition Magic and Boot Manager helped make the process of dual booting easier, but it was still a process that most chose to only run on their extra practice machine.

Today things are much easier thanks to Virtual PCs. A Virtual PC is a software tool that you can install on your current machine. The Virtual PC emulates a stand alone PC. So once we have a virtual machine installed on our current machine we can then install another operating system onto the virtual machine. The new operating system will run within the virtual machine independent of our current operating system.

This means that we can install and uninstall, test software to our hearts content, without having to partition or reformat our hard disks. After you have installed the virtual PC software it is a good idea to check the minimum requirements of the new OS that you will be installing, because as we create our Virtual PC we need to allocate hard drive space and memory. These resources come from our available hard drive space and memory, so you don’t want to degrade the performance of your main OS by allocating too many resources to the Virtual PC.

Windows 7 uses a Virtual Machine to run XP Mode so that Windows 7 users can still use older software programs. I will be talking about using XP Mode on Windows 7 in the next article.

If you are running Windows Vista or XP you can use Virtual PC 2007 to create a virtual machine environment to run and test multiple operating systems.

If you are running Vista Home Premium and you try to install Virtual PC 2007 you will get an error saying that the OS is not supported and to upgrade your OS to Ultimate or another Vista option. You can just bypass this option, because even though it isn’t supported it runs fine on Vista Home Premium.

Virtual PCs are great for creating test environments and studying for certification exams. Virtual machines are also being used in Enterprise environments to save on resources. In the past Enterprise environments would require several separate physical servers to function. For instance a business may require several domain controllers, an application server, an email server, and an Internet Server.

With a virtual environment more than one server can be set up on the same physical machine requiring less physical resources. Companies like VMWare specialize in Virtual Servers for enterprise environments. With Windows 7 having it’s own Virtual PC and enterprise computing embracing the virtual environment virtual computing is here to stay