October, 2006

Good news - the Virtual PC 2007 Beta is now available. You can sign up for it here: https://connect.microsoft.com/programdetails.aspx?ProgramDetailsID=874 . Major changes include: Support for hardware virtualization (Intel and AMD) Support...

This is a great game, but if you needed me to tell you that then I do not know where you have been. Released in 1999 this game has been heralded as one of the greatest real-time strategy games of all times. AoEII has many of the elements common to most...

I have received a couple of emails asking me about installing Virtual Server 2005 R2 on Windows Vista RC1 / RC2 (and I will admit that it is very lazy of me to have not posted directions yet). For the most part it is just like it was for Windows Vista...

I recently wanted to Ghost a physical computer to a virtual machine. This is usually best done with a TCP/IP boot disk that you can run in both locations, and by storing the Ghost image on a file server. Now, I have set this up in the past but I seemed...

A while ago we announced that we were making the VHD format available, royalty free, to people who were interested in using it in their products. Today we have announced that we are releasing this format under the Open Specification Promise (OSP). If...

Just like Gorilla.bas , Nibbles.bas is a source code based QBasic game that shipped with MS-DOS 5, Windows 95 and others. Nibbles is a version of the classic 'snake' game where you control a snake that must avoid running into walls and itself, which is...

Gorilla.bas is a BASIC game that shipped with MS-DOS 5, Windows 95 and a couple of other OSes (interestingly it was not included in MS-DOS 6 or 6.22). The game actually shipped as a source (.bas) file that you needed to load and run with QBasic. Gorilla...

Now that the beta of Virtual PC 2007 is available for general use, and is able to run on Windows Vista, without disabling Aero glass, there are a number of cool things you can do. One of my personal favorites is to use the new application changer, Flip...

Which means it is my birthday (yay for me!), but it also means that the new Windows Datacenter licensing announced back in July is now in effect. To recap, for those of you who missed the original announcement, Windows Server 2003 R2 Datacenter Edition...

In the past I have written about the fact that Virtual PCs support for wireless network adapters is a bit hit and miss (details here: http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2005/10/13/479773.aspx ). As this is a result of hardware limitations the...

There have been a couple of minor changes to the New Virtual Machine Wizard in Virtual PC 2007 to help address usability issues that have been identified. The first change is to the operating system configuration page. I have never liked this page myself...

Well, today's looking kind of crazy so I do not think I'll have time to play a game on Virtual PC today. However, I can tell you that we have a job opening for a virtualization technical writer on the Windows Server User Assistance team. I work very closely...

If you're using Virtual PC 2007 on Windows Vista -- you may see an error from Virtual PC that states that it cannot launch your virtual machine because the files are marked read-only (but you know the files are not marked read-only). What you're seeing...

Another useful WMI counter that is exposed by Virtual Server is the virtual machine uptime (how long the virtual machine has been running since it was last started or rebooted). This is reported in seconds, so I had to do some tweaking with mod and div...

I have known about this issue for a while - but I have kept on forgetting to post about it. If you have Virtual Server installed on a Windows XP SP2 computer you may see an 'Access Denied' error when you try to open the Administrative website. The simple...

Continuing on our saga through the undocumented Virtual Server WMI interfaces, we now arrive at disk usage information. Here is a sample script that will create a list of the currently running virtual machines, and display the amount of disk activity...

Virtual Server also exposes a fair amount of information on the virtual machine heartbeat through WMI. The virtual machine heartbeat is generated by Virtual Machine Additions when it is installed inside the virtual machine. This script returns all of...

I do not like this game. It's funny - cause I like the original Total Annihilation a lot (as discussed here ) - but I just don't like this game. TA: Kingdoms uses exactly the same engine as the original game, with different skins and a different story...

And to celebrate - I am providing a nice Halloween theme for the Virtual Server website: Just download the files attached to this post and place the .GIFs in "WebSite\VirtualServer\images" under the Virtual Server installation directory, and the...