I heard that VPC was extremely slow and was very bugged. It requires a VPC CD/CD KEY. I suggest using Guest PC, which you can find free, but all you need is a real Windows CD, not an ISO or burned CD. Guest PC is also said to be less bugged.

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I have used MS Virtual PC last year for one of the classes I was taking (Operating Systems in fact) and it had no problems whatsoever. And we got it for free too because it was for educational purposes.
If you download a pirated version obviously it may ask for a CD key.
However I was running Slackware 10 on an XP machine with absolutely no problems, all drives, samba, network, internet, they all worked. I would think that even X windows would work although I have not tried it, I prefer the command prompt.

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Ahh .. what is virtual pc?

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Emulating another OS always makes the programs run slower, I feel sory for every linux user who has the emulate windows programs on his computer, it has to suck very hard

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More information on Microsoft Virtual PC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_pc

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Why not just used the Apple-released Boot Camp that is freeware? It allows you to dual-boot Windows XP, instead of slowly try to emulate it natively.

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Because most people don't have Mac. That pretty much sums it up.

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it's kinda funny how people who have pc want a mac, and how mac users do anything to change their mac into a pc. Virtual PC is like the opposite of the pride that mac-users have about their mac..

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For one, Virtual PC for PCs suxk. No USB support, horrible grafx emulation, etc. Sure it's free now, but that's like giving away free shoes to people in wheel chairs. Sure it looks good on them, but they can't use 'em.

Now VirtualPC 2007 may have changes, and may be better, and yes it will be free, but VMWare is by far the best at this. They have been doing it longer and have way more options. It's not free, but it kicks butt!

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When i was on work experience at a university we did test both VMWare (VMW) and Virtual PC (VPC), the first problem came with VPC as usual with microsoft they have to be awkward so we couldnt load or run VPC onto an XP Home machine it had to be Pro, a small problem for a large university with unused licenses floating around but a huge problem for a simple home user who doesnt have £80 to spend on software.

So VMW was running on a host of xp home and VPC was hosted on XP pro, sorted. The guest was to be the current vista beta (yes I know basing ANYTHING on beta software isnt foolproof), we used the same version on each machine, to install we used a CD emulator to install the ISO we downloaded. The overall goal was to get Vista to run stable and fast and obviously usable and if posible to get Aero to run (Aero is the coolest GUI i have ever seen! check it out!) We knew the hardware was capable of Aero and Vista is the only OS capable of it so we thought there would be no problems, well, there were. Both machines had issues with the drivers for the hardware so thats probably an issue with the vista beta, but on VMW we was able to slightly fix the problem and get a slightly higher colour depth and resolution than on VPC so that was probably due to the differences betwen VPC and VMW.

Aside from that was speed, there was a huge, and i mean huge difference in responsiveness, stability and overall speed. VMW ran the vista beta like any other OS, smoothly, stable and responsive with only a few minor lags that you would expect from beta software whereas VPC running vista was almost unusable, it took around 10 minutes to load the OS and from then on it was unstable, extremely unresponsive with several crashes where i had to use task manager to manually end the proccess as it crashed so often and just generally bad.

So overall I say that in comparison VMW is the only choice, it doesnt need any fussy software requirements or any fusst installations, just simply and quick and effective, unfortunately i havent got to try either with a publicly released OS but you can see the differences, they could be due to the fact that vista is so heavy on resources but when VPC or VMW were minimised there wasnt any noticeable differences on the host so i would still say it was due to issues with VPC so avoid VPC!

 

 

 

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