Just found out about this after browsing through some sites. Microsoft is offering a their Virtual PC 2004 program for the public at no charge. Just downloaded now...it's under 20MB in size. This program allows you to install other versions of Windows "inside" of Windows itself. So if you are worried about messing up your system or don't want to format and create other partitions for Windows, this program should do it for you. You will be running in the Virtual PC program, which in turn, will run the other Windows operating system if you installed them.

Let's see how this will fare against VMware

The link to the free download is here. Have fun

It sure is a good thing that it's being offered for free. This isn't something that Micrsoft is used to . But does it allow to install only Windows operating systems or Linux as well. Because I've used VMWare and it does a bang-up job in both Windows and Linux. How good is this compared to VMWare?

Yeah, that's the bad part. It supposedly only supports the Windows operating system. So Linux is probably a no-go. See the chart here.

I always wanted to play around with Virtual PC, but never had a chance to...Like you, I'm a VMware user. I will test this out when I have more time and see how it fairs against VMware.

As a long time user on the Mac of the product back before microsoft bought the program, it works pretty well. I remember having some trouble with a few features with Windows 98, but hey even wireless internet worked with my Airport card.

Still this is of no surprise to me since Apple switched to Intel chips, there isn't going to be much of a Market as us Mac users switch over to the Mactels in the coming years. This is cool though, because I still have a couple unused Win98SE and Windows 2000 Pro licenses around here, so I can install them now on my new Powerbook i just bought from a friend. I'm guessing 1.33Ghz G4 with 2GB of ram should run windows the way it was meant to be run: in a window on a Mac

I was thinking of installing bootcamp on my mac but now that this is free I think that I will hold off untill the beta is over or untill lepord is released. Rumer has it bootcamp will be included with the final release.

Thanks for informing us of this, I'm going to give it a go however, I must admit that I'm a bit of a VMWare fan myself. My last experience of VirtualPC wasn't very good, instability plaguing the system but may be that was an old version of somthing.

Thanks again!

Strange thing, I'm not in need of it. Looks like sometype of ''catch''? Anyways, XP is better then any 98 or 95, so I just forget everything about it.

I've been using VPC for a few month and I do like it more than the Vmware workstation. First of all, it's free and it is able to make new virtual machines (something vmware player can't) and it feels like it's running a bit faster compared to vmware.
The lack of linux support hasn't been a problem, I've never had the intention to install a virtual linux environement (my virtual windows environement is solely made for trying software and visiting louche sites so I don't have to worry about screwing up my real windows installation )

I used to use Virtual PC 2004 until it became so slow to use that I decided to try VMware Workstation 5. I was shocked about the faster speed that VMware ran Windows XP compared to Virtual PC 2004.

But now I think the speeds have evened as Microsoft has recently released Virtual PC 2007, also as a free download. It runs OSs faster than Virtual PC 2004, with a set of new features.

For now I am staying with VMware Workstation as is more cross-platform as it supports a variety of host operating systems and guest operating systems.

Well, as I try to avoid products from Microsoft, I never used Virtual PC, it wasn't free, but as it is free now, I still am used to VMware Player to do some stuff, besides google is full of tutorials and other resources about VMware and about the Virtual PC, the tutorials and different resources are "not so good" but this isn't a very big issue though, just a notice. ;P