Product Reviews

The ease with which websites and web applications can run on any computer has made the hardware-specific approach of operating system companies such as Microsoft and Apple look a little outdated. No wonder, then, that they're both increasingly keen on virtualisation technology. Apple will include BootCamp, which allows Mac users to run Windows on their machines, with the next version of Mac OS X, and Microsoft has made the 2007 version of its Virtual PC software available for free download.

Virtual PC 2007 is compatible with every version of Windows from 98 onwards, and can also work with DOS. As you'd expect from Microsoft, it works well with Vista and not with Linux, so it isn't as good as InnoTek's free VirtualBox (What's New, May 2007).

When you first launch Virtual PC 2007 you're presented with a console that lists your virtual machines and allows you to create new ones. Creating a new virtual machine is done using a familiar Windows wizard. When creating a virtual machine, you allocate memory and

ADVERTISEMENT

hard disk space. The console also lets you add optical drives and networking options, which worked well. Our Windows XP test machine uses a wireless LAN connection to the internet, and Virtual PC had no trouble making this available for the virtual machines.

A virtual machine can run either in a window or fullscreen. When windowed, Virtual PC 2007 has a range of icons that show when the virtual system is accessing system resources such as the hard disk and optical drive. As with the console interface, this area of Virtual PC doesn't quite have the same finesse as VirtualBox; there's no onscreen reminder of the hotkey for alternating between control of the virtual machine and control of the host OS, for instance.

We tested Virtual PC using the Home Premium version of Vista; it seemed to take longer to install than on VirtualBox, but once the installer had finished the OS ran fine, although performance will really depend on the amount of memory you dedicate to it. Networking and sound worked well, although you can't enable the flash Aero desktop, as Virtual PC, like VirtualBox, doesn't emulate a 3D graphics card.

Annoyingly, Virtual PC lacks VirtualBox's USB support, although it does have a very cool trick up its sleeve: it supports the drag and drop of files from the virtual machine to the host, and vice versa. It's a killer feature, and will make it very easy to use Virtual PC to run old software and access the data on newer systems. For Windows-based operating systems, Virtual PC 2007 is a great application, but VirtualBox 2007 has better support for other operating systems.