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MS Virtual PC Now Free


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by Wyatt Barnett

This just in: Microsoft Virtual PC is now free! Now, you might ask, how does this help me as a developer? Well, let me count the ways:

  • It lets one much more easily replicate the production environment without investing in hardware.
  • It lets one test out beta software (such as IE 7 or Windows Vista) without breaking their current, working installation.
  • Because the VPC image is stored as a file, it allows one to do some serious test runs on violate resources, such as databases, then restore to status quo ante-bellum without complex scripts.

Enjoy.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 13th, 2006 at 4:51 am, contains 91 words, and is filed under .NET. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. The views and opinions in this blog post are those of its author.

This post has 14 responses so far

  1. nblavoie.com Says:
    July 13th, 2006 at 5:24 am

    Hum, Redmond felt the pressure of VMWare and other virtualization applications. Is the Mac version also free?

     
  2. myrdhrin Says:
    July 13th, 2006 at 5:47 am

    They felt it but still missed a point… you can’t run Linux as a virtual machine or run the software on a Linux box.

    Ok… its Microsoft but still….

     
  3. wwb_99 Says:
    July 13th, 2006 at 5:59 am

    @nblavoie–I really could not answer; I am not down with the iLife.

    @myrdhin–actually, being able to run Linux (or MS-DOS, OS/2, NT 3.51 or just about anything that ran on x86 hardware) without using extra hardware is part of the point of virtual PCs. I have SUSE installing on my new VPC as I speak.

     
  4. paulgb Says:
    July 13th, 2006 at 6:43 am

    I’m downloading it now. Does it have network abilities? I am hoping to be able to install Linux on it and set up a LAMP server for development.

     
  5. hyperkik Says:
    July 13th, 2006 at 7:23 am

    The Mac version should be free - I have it and it is truly awful - but it appears to still be for sale. With Bootcamp available for Intel-based Macs, I imagine that it will soon be unsupported, free or both.

     
  6. Matthew Magain Says:
    July 13th, 2006 at 10:22 am

    Too bad it doesn’t run on XP Home! Bah!

     
  7. craiga Says:
    July 13th, 2006 at 11:13 am

    myrdhin — Here’s a list of things that Virtual PC can and can’t run, complete with notes on how to get tricky things up and going.

    Matthew Magain — Virtual PC runs just fine on WinXP Home. It does pop up a warning message telling you that it’s unsupported, but I’ve been using it for a while running Windows and Linux inside virtual machines and I’ve had no problems.

     
  8. Matthew Magain Says:
    July 13th, 2006 at 4:03 pm

    Thanks Craig! Should have persisted!

     
  9. Eric.Coleman Says:
    July 13th, 2006 at 4:10 pm

    I didn’t know the Mac version of VPC even worked on the intel hardware…. if it does, that’s news to me…

     
  10. dhtmlgod Says:
    July 13th, 2006 at 11:44 pm

    I might just be really stupid, but I think this has been free for a few months now…

     
  11. wwb_99 Says:
    July 14th, 2006 at 12:51 am

    @dhtmlgod: not stupid, just slightly confused. Virtual Server has been free for a few months, which is a slighly different product from VPC.

     
  12. Dave Cardwell Says:
    July 14th, 2006 at 5:02 am

    @nblavoie - according to a microsoft blog,

    We’ve already made Virtual Server available for free, so it only makes sense that Virtual PC should follow suit. (Note: This does not include Virtual PC for Mac.)

    Lovely.

     
  13. illogix Says:
    July 15th, 2006 at 5:34 am

    It is to note that VMWare Pro and VMWare Server are also free and much better products.

    If you run Linux, Xen Source is even better.

     
  14. Dan Schulz Says:
    July 17th, 2006 at 3:54 pm

    Cool. I got a copy of VPC for my birthday last year. Now I feel sorry for the person who went out of his way to get it for me.

     

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Wyatt Barnett

Wyatt Barnett

Wyatt leads the in-house development team for a major industry trade association. When not slinging obscene amounts of C# and SQL at a few exceedingly large monitors, he is most often spotted staring at HDTV and other forms of entertainment in local watering holes.

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