MS Virtual PC Now Free

By Wyatt Barnett | July 13, 2006 | ASP.NET

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.

Wyatt Barnett

{ 14 comments }

Dan Schulz July 17, 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.
illogix July 15, 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.
Dave Cardwell July 14, 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.
wwb_99 July 14, 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.
dhtmlgod July 13, 2006 at 11:44 pm: I might just be really stupid, but I think this has been free for a few months now…
Eric.Coleman July 13, 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…
Matthew Magain July 13, 2006 at 4:03 pm: Thanks Craig! Should have persisted!
craiga July 13, 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.
Matthew Magain July 13, 2006 at 10:22 am: Too bad it doesn’t run on XP Home! Bah!
hyperkik July 13, 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.
paulgb July 13, 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.
wwb_99 July 13, 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.
myrdhrin July 13, 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….
nblavoie.com July 13, 2006 at 5:24 am: Hum, Redmond felt the pressure of VMWare and other virtualization applications. Is the Mac version also free?