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Reading Microsoft's new End User Licensing Agreement (EULA), Parallels discovered that it expressly prohibits running the Home Basic and Home Premium editions of Vista in a virtual machine.

Under a section headed 'Use with virtualization technologies' the EULA states: 'You may not use the software installed on the licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system.'

Ben

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Rudolph, Parallels' head of marketing, asks why would Microsoft do this?

'To me, this strategy could hold back users who embrace cutting-edge technologies like virtualization, which means they won't upgrade to Vista,' he wrote on the Parallels blog. 'This means that Microsoft has effectively lost an upgrade customer (in the case of Windows PCs) or an entirely new customer (for Mac and Linux users).'

Apple's Boot Camp is not virtualisation software and therefore it can be used to run Vista Home editions without violating the EULA. However Boot Camp does not officially support any version of Vista, only XP SP2, although there are numerous reports of successful installations. Apple has not said when it will add support for the new Microsoft OS.