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Virtual PC 2007 Has anyone tried it? 1 click switch Between Vista and XP.

1151 Views 6 Replies 6 Participants Last post by yevot, May 25, 2007

dannieboiz

Discussion Starter · May 23, 2007

I think this is would be awesome for t hose that MUST have Vista, but can't get some of their other software/hardware to work with Vista yet.

Install Vista and XP Pro on one Machine (sorta like dual boot but better)....

If anyone have used this, what's your feedback?

Virtual PC 2007

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ChrisL01

· #2 · May 23, 2007

Sure, it works great. Just know that their isn't hardware acceleration for things like video in Virtual PC. So if you are trying to do stuff like that it's not going to work that great.

Other than that, just make sure the host PC has tons of RAM. The more RAM you can allocate to each machine (host and virtual) the better.

Chris

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dannieboiz

Discussion Starter · #3 · May 23, 2007

Quote:
Originally Posted by ChrisL01 /forum/post/0

Sure, it works great. Just know that their isn't hardware acceleration for things like video in Virtual PC. So if you are trying to do stuff like that it's not going to work that great.

Other than that, just make sure the host PC has tons of RAM. The more RAM you can allocate to each machine (host and virtual) the better.

Chris

I have a Twinhand 1020A Sat card that I use but doesn't work too well with Vista. Just regular OTA Sat. no HD what so ever. Do u think it should be capable of handling this taste? Switch to XP for Sat. TV and switch back to Vista for everything else?

BTW: I have 2gb at the moment. Going to have 4gb next week once my other 2gb arrive in the mail. 1gb for XP and 3 for Vista. I'm sure that's plenty.

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N3W813

· #4 · May 24, 2007

That really depends on what you are trying to accomplish in the Vista virtual PC. Virtual PC will not emulate most of the multimedia hardware that you have in your system; ie tv tuners, almost non-existant usb device support, etc. No hardware acceleration of video; no dxva, 3D, etc.

It'll be better if you make 2 partitions and dual boot your machine. This way, both of your OSes will use the complete 4GB memory rather than sharing it.

Until VMware and Microsoft implement hypervisor technology in desktop virutalization, I don't see any positives using virtual machines for daily use.

YMMV

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dandirk

· #5 · May 24, 2007

I use microsoft VPC almost daily, though we will be moving to vmware soon..

As mentioned VPC doesn't mimic exact hardware well. The BIOS and hardware it does use is old, doesn't even support APCI HAL but rather the older static IRQ HAL. I would stay away from using VPC for support/functionality of specific hardware.

I personally could see using it at home for some apps that aren't supported in Vista, at least until either they are supported or a viable replacement comes along.

Apps that processing or do batch work on files or transcode files would be good candidates, if you can live the with performance hit. Apps like file name changers, encoders, meta-data taggers, rippers etc

I know audiograbber has some issues with Vista, though I don't know how it would handle the access to the CDROM through VPC.

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sync

· #6 · May 24, 2007

I don't like it that Miscrosoft won't let you run the home version of Vista in VPC. So VPC is free but you need an expensive version of Vista.

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yevot

· #7 · May 25, 2007

Quote:
Originally Posted by dannieboiz /forum/post/0

Install Vista and XP Pro on one Machine (sorta like dual boot but better)....

Actually, I must strongly disagree. I tried Virtual PC and it had everything but one important feature: performance. Besides, how long does it take to boot between O/Ss? 90seconds? If you want a choice between O/Ss, do a dual boot. There are a lot of sites that have easy, step-by-step walkthroughs ( like this ) and Vista even comes with a new boot manager so you can easily select which to boot.

However, I would recommend Virtual PC if you MUST run two operating systems at once (like if one program is compatible with only one and another is compatible with only the other). That's very rare though.

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