Man this stuff is great and solves some thorny problems. Am I the last one on the block to discover it?

The problem that I've had is that I never have a machine with enough horsepower (or probably memory). With 1GB of memory, you're on the fringe of being able to run XP and say Win2K3 on a virtual machine and hoping to get decent performance using your development tools.

One thing I've found it particularly handy for (but becoming less and less of an issue) is Windows 98. I always hated polluting any machine with that junk, but a couple of years ago it was still very important to make sure that your app worked as expected under 98. That was a perfect use for a VM.

JimFoye wrote:

Man this stuff is great and solves some thorny problems. Am I the last one on the block to discover it?

Definitely you have to have the horsepower. I went from 256 megs to 2 gig when I got my new Dell workstation last year; no accident that I've since started using this stuff.

I have about 5 different images I use with Virtual PC, they allow me to test my deployment packages on a variety of OS and system configurations. I agree if you expect to do any work within Virtual PC, you need a hefty machine. 1 gig ram is a minimum and a dual cpu box doesn't hurt either.

John

Indeed it is a great tool for running / testing scripted installers like Install Shield Developer MSI installers.

Another cool thing that I did, with VPC2k4, my laptop, and a pen pad was to write some demo tablet pc apps without having a "real" tablet pc.

its also good for QC teams that are going to be testing and always need clean machines to work with, but I agree that it is a hog.

I tried to install team foundation server and team studio into a win2k3 server image and it failed miserably.

Not enough horse power here, though I've given it a try. A couple people I know use it a lot so I know how powerful it is.

My alternative? I'm usually always working on at least two computers at once. I've got my workstation and my laptop on the same desk, so when one of those is busy, I move to the other. And if both of those are busy, I terminal into another computer and put it to work. That seems to work the best for me, as the speed of each computer usually remains constant.

I've played around with Virtual PC just a little bit, but I liked VMWare Workstation better, and that's what I use.