My new (virtual) PC

Wow, this is one of the coolest programs ever. The rest of you have been talking about Virtual PC and virtualization in general for a while now, but I finally had a chance to play with it for myself.

The virtual PC is a real PC, about as perfect a simulation as you can imagine. For example, it has its own MAC address, gets a unique IP address from the router, and can even share files over the network with the "host" PC. Obviously this means you get full internet access and all that goes with it.

What does it cost? It's free! Download Virtual PC 2007 from Microsoft's download site. Of course, to do anything interesting you'll need an OS and a bunch of applications, you'll need to buy Windows (or a Linux distribution) but you don't need to buy any hardware.

What's missing? USB emulation, so to do printing (for example) you need to use shared printing from another machine. To copy files from my USB drive, I first shared it from the host machine and that let me view everything from the virtual PC.

One tip: switch between the Virtual PC window and the "main" machine by pressing the right ALT key for operations , i.e. the ALT key on the right side of your keyboard--not the left one that I tend to use most often.

My next step is to figure out how to save a given Virtual PC image so I can copy it, back it up, hand it around to other people, etc.