Hyper-V Program Manager
A number of people have been confused by the fact that the Virtual Machine Additions that are included with Virtual PC 2007 fail to install on Windows 95. The reason for this is twofold:
So what does all this mean if you want to run Windows 95 on Virtual PC 2007? The first thing to know is that it will still run, just without Virtual Machine Additions. The next thing to know is that if you take the Virtual Machine Additions from Virtual PC 2004 and install them on Windows 95 under Virtual PC 2007, it should work. Keep in mind that this is all unsupported.
Cheers,Ben
Hmm. It seems like one of the great uses for VPC is in a test lab, replacing a bunch of crufty old PC boxen. I'm sure those folks still have legitamate needs to run the old systems. But I also understand the "out with the old; in with the new" idea.
If the VPC 2004 additions work with Win95, how about distributing them with VPC 2007 and make an option in the menus?
Our company transitioned from a ghost solution to Virtual PC around 3 years ago as running operating systems like Windows 95 on modern hardware was getting almost impossible. Virtual PC was (and still is) a god send. Normally I can understand that support for old products has to end however one of the main reasons for virtualization is the ability to upgrade while still keeping legacy systems easily available. In my humble opinion, Windows 95 is still very important.
It is sad but now that Virtual PC is free all I I seem to be seeing from Microsoft is lack of commitment to the product. Sure we get Vista support but that was a must, however a lot of the features being added by VMware, etc. are not going into VPC. Virtual PC is slowly being killed off.
Is OS/2 Warp 4 still a supported guest operating system?
Hi Ben, I've made some tests and although you can install the VPC 2004 Additions, it seems not to work well till the system is rebooted 2 times. For all the people that still use this OS and NT 4 remember that, reboot 2 times or the Additions won't work properly.
I want also to remember that the VMAdditionsforVistaB2.iso supplied with the Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Beta also doesn't work with Windows 95 (it seems the new programation code of the new setup for the Additions start here) so the latest setup installable Additions for unsupported OSes are 13.306.
Greets,
Akuma.
Guys, hello?
I'm not trying to be flippant, or be negative, but...
Every one of these "can't do" resons is just another reason to select VMWare.
I'm one of a few MS developers in a predominately Unix shop, and the WMWare bias is obvious.
The more restrictive you make this product, the easier it is for the nay-sayers to edge me out...
Know what I mean?
Tim -
Yes.
Cheers,
Ben
Dan, I'm also an user of vmWare, I've just installed the latest Beta of vmWare Workstation 6 as well as the latest beta of Virtual PC 2007.
I can see the same differences that make VPC a better option since Connectix was making this program. The most important thing that you can notice at the first time is the speed. The emulation of VPC is more accurate that the vmWare Workstation that seems to have all the time making optimizations for specific OS support at decent speed. This is not good. If you wanna get a better optimization for the program that musn't be on a specific OS, it must be on the main program, by making emulation closest possible to real hardware.
This issue of wmWare Workstation with the speed is patent so clearly when you install Windows 98 SE. Try to install and use it, and you'll see a sloooooooooow system running, even with the wmWare Additions installed (can't remember the exact name, but it makes the same effect that VPC Additions on guest OSes).
I recognice that this don't happen with other OSes cause they I've optimized wmWare for it (what I was talking before), but still in ALL the OSes emulated you can see that always video emulation speed is faster on VPC than in wmWare.
The only things I like wmWare that VPC don't have are:
- Full USB support, now with even 2.0 USB speed. Yeah!, I'm still waiting since the Connectix VPC for this feature.
- Video RAM share, this is a new cool feature where you can asign video memory from your real video card to the guest OS. You can assign up to 128 mb, against the 8 mb. of video RAM VPC gets after Additions installation.
- Processor selection, you can select if you want to use both processor cores in the guest OS or only one of them. Of course you need a Duo, Xeon, etc. processors with more than one core or more than one processor. This is also a cool feature.
- Multi-network cards, you can have more than 1 network card emulated binded to different real network hardware.
That four things are the only four things wich wmWare Workstation is better than VPC, but you also must remember a very important thing: wmWare Workstation ISN'T free (the server version is the free one, but that isn't designed to desktop working) meanwhile VPC IS free.
I hope the VPC guys team soon will implement the USB emulation support in the PC version of VPC.