microsoft.com — Not a demo, not a timed trial, but fully free. FTA: "Whether Microsoft virtualization technology is an important component of your existing infrastructure or you're just a Virtual PC enthusiast, you can now download Virtual PC 2004 Service Pack 1 absolutely free."
Jul 12, 2006 View in Crawl 4
concept03Jul 12, 2006Submitter
I agree, competition in this area only benefits the consumer. That is, as long as it remains competitive and the market isn't reduced to a single company...
spyrochaeteJul 12, 2006
Retro gaming! Virtual PC runs DOS games much more accurately than DOSbox!And it's not a stupid question at all, by the way. Only uber nerds have much use for this software.
Closed AccountJul 12, 2006
Does it still not support 24-bit color on the desktop? It royally f**ks up the look of Ubuntu when you try to install it without doing a work-around to get it to install using 16-bit color.
amoebaJul 13, 2006
How can I use this to install Ubuntu?
darkhackJul 13, 2006
Thank alot Micrsoft, your so kind for making this FREE for us all!
nahorJul 13, 2006
"Q is *not* way faster"It is in my experience.@ sakabakoThere is a built in converter in Q under tools (import from vpc7 disk image)
Closed AccountJul 18, 2006
Not totally free for XP Home users. You have to upgrade to XP Professional.
almostevilJul 21, 2006
@KCoraxThis is oldish now, so I doubt you'll see this.. however, VMWare Workstation has the following advantages over Virtual PC 2004.* Greater networking configurability of virtual machines* You can use virtual machines with TWO processors rather than one* The snapshot (and manager) feature is incredibly useful, especially if you're wanting to do some testing of different programs or settings that you know may hose your VM like say running a suspect program that you think may be a virus/trojan. You can simply roll back to a snapshot before you ran it.* Excellent non-Microsoft operating system support.* Greater virtual machine performance over Virtual PC.* Direct 3D support, albeit experimental.The only performance advantage VPC has over VMWare is i'd say the video driver, for some reason it has always seemed slightly more quicker/responsive. Which is kind of pointless for a virtual machine.
kcoraxJul 22, 2006
@AlmostEvil * Greater networking configurability of virtual machinesThe VPC machines are given a network interface that is seen as a network card on the host machine. End of story.* You can use virtual machines with TWO processors rather than onePointless, the performance can't change. I can see this feature f**king up the out of order execution optimizers. Maybe that's why it's so slow.* The snapshot (and manager) feature is incredibly useful, especially if you're wanting to This has been available in VPC 6 months after the respective VMW release.* Excellent non-Microsoft operating system support.I run linux just fine thank you.* Greater virtual machine performance over Virtual PC.Hell no. We host virtual servers in a sandboxed environment to improve reliability. If one image fails it's replaced immediatelly. VMW is terribly slower when hosting windows. In fact I suspect VPC is so fast because it doesn't exactly virtualize everything.* Direct 3D support, albeit experimental.Who gives a s**t ? Really are you gonna run visually demanding apps like games in a sandbox ?!?!
jeolmeunFeb 20, 2007
2007 version is free now. <a class="user" href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/default.mspx">http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/default.mspx</a>
kuallaFeb 21, 2007
Anyone know how much better the "Improved performance" is in the 2007 version?