MS Gives away free copies of XP for Virtualization

TimothyC · Post by **TimothyC** » 2007-04-24 02:51pm

While they are only for VirtualPC, and they are time limited (They expire in August), I figured that you guys might like the link so here it is.

I'm DLing it right now for my next XP install.....

General Zod · Post by **General Zod** » 2007-04-24 02:55pm

Interesting. I'll have to give it a download once I'm off work.

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2007-04-24 03:14pm

EXE's?

Is there any way to use them with VirtualPC for Mac, or Parallels?

EDIT: Wait, VPC for Windows is now free software? Is this Microsoft's trying to take down VMWare by dumping the product?

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2007-04-24 03:21pm

Praxis wrote:EXE's?

Is there any way to use them with VirtualPC for Mac, or Parallels?

EDIT: Wait, VPC for Windows is now free software?

Has been for a while.

Comosicus · Post by **Comosicus** » 2007-04-24 03:23pm

There was a previous version, time-bombed to April 1st. This is the official supported way to have both IE7 (on the physical machine) and IE6 (on the virtual PC) for development purposes.

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2007-04-24 03:34pm

Awww. I tried to run Virtual PC 2007 in Parallels (Virtual Machine in a Virtual Machine) but VPC said it was incompatible with my processor (Core Duo, but the VM just reports it as a Genuine Intel).

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2007-04-24 04:02pm

This image is really only for IE6 testing - it can't do much else.

Post by **Beowulf** » 2007-04-24 04:20pm

It's for IE7 testing as well (or rather, the IE7 image is). It's so web developers can see what joe schmoe would see on a clean install of windows. I suppose you could use it for regular web browsing if you're paranoid (oops, it got infected, wipe and reload).

RThurmont · Post by **RThurmont** » 2007-04-24 06:02pm

Well, one really awesome thing about virtualization is it lets you do just that - wipe and reload. I've been tempted to run XP VMs on top of my XP installs for awhile for doing browsing/internet stuff in, but thus far I've only used non-Windows OSes in VMs (Linuxes, BSDs, QNX, Netware, Solaris, ReactOS, Syllable, and Haiku I believe is the complete list ATM). My goal over the next few months is to slowly reverse this, so on most of my computers the base install is Linux and Windows runs in a VM. ATM, I have four non-Windows OSes on bare metal, my Crapintosh excluded (but tonight I hope to put Feisty on it-I was going to do it last night but didn't start the download until midnight, and instead did some gaming).

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2007-04-24 06:04pm

RThurmont wrote:Well, one really awesome thing about virtualization is it lets you do just that - wipe and reload.

Better VM systems (i.e. VMWare Workstation) will let you roll back as well.

RThurmont · Post by **RThurmont** » 2007-04-24 06:07pm

VMWare Workstation is hot. It allows the use of multiple snapshots, which can enable you do to things like take images of your system with certain apps loaded/installed, so you get totally optimized performance every time. I badly want to buy it, and I think I will, but I want to wait until I get a ThinkCentre in the next few months so I have some halfway decent hardware to run it on.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2007-04-24 06:24pm

RThurmont wrote:VMWare Workstation is hot. It allows the use of multiple snapshots, which can enable you do to things like take images of your system with certain apps loaded/installed, so you get totally optimized performance every time. I badly want to buy it, and I think I will, but I want to wait until I get a ThinkCentre in the next few months so I have some halfway decent hardware to run it on.

Eh, the performance advantage isn't that great (Windows rot, IMHO, is vastly overrated) after the cost of virtualization is taken into account. That said, it certainly is nifty (and I'm getting more RAM for my T60 so I can run more VMs at once)