Multi-monitor fullscreen mode compatibility with Virtual PC 2007

re: Multi-monitor fullscreen mode compatibility with Virtual PC 2007

Rutger — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 15:31:48 GMT

I Usually connect to running vpc's using the remote desktop as I am under the impression that this is faster.

re: Multi-monitor fullscreen mode compatibility with Virtual PC 2007

Paulo — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 16:02:41 GMT

That's brilliant! I always wanted support for full-screen on a second monitor!

re: Multi-monitor fullscreen mode compatibility with Virtual PC 2007

Infidel — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 16:12:55 GMT

It's working great so far - no matter what monitor the fullscreen resides on.

re: Multi-monitor fullscreen mode compatibility with Virtual PC 2007

Dan Maltes — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 17:57:37 GMT

VPC 2007 still struggles from an extrememly poor user experience. Why on earth do I have to do so many things manually and seperately?

Being forced to dig through the help files is just awful. Installing a guest OS should be so much simpler. Instead, it's broken up into a completely seperate step that is very confusing. I have to drag something onto a CD or floppy symbol at the bottom of the window? Ridiculous. The wizard that creates a new virtual machine should walk me through everything, including installing a new OS. KEEP IT SIMPLE.

A usability expert really needs to get their hands on this product and streamline the workflow. It's a struggle.

re: Multi-monitor fullscreen mode compatibility with Virtual PC 2007

Ilya — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 19:13:35 GMT

This is great... Definitely makes for a much-improved experience of working with a virtual machine.

re: Multi-monitor fullscreen mode compatibility with Virtual PC 2007

Bryant — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 00:14:19 GMT

That's a great improvement! Will we ever be able to use multiple monitors for a single VPC instance?

re: Multi-monitor fullscreen mode compatibility with Virtual PC 2007

Dan — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 03:15:29 GMT

Dan Maltes:

Perhaps the wizard could offer to take you a bit further, but I don't think it's unreasonable to assume a person interested in using Virtual PCs... um... knows something about setting up PCs. I find mounting an ISO is a lot easier than digging through my CD cases for an OS installation CD. :)

re: Multi-monitor fullscreen mode compatibility with Virtual PC 2007

Xepol — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 03:42:51 GMT

Yes, the improved full screen is great. I have bug that I'm trying to find all the edges on that keeps my VPC from expanding to maximum full screen-ness tho. It just stays the same res intead with a big black border.

@Dan Maltes: You want it to wipe yer butt too? It creates the VMC and VHD files. Installing stuff on it is YOUR responsibility. Though most people don't know it, there are HUNDREDS (if not more) of OSes that you can install. Asking the VPC team to custom install each OS for you isn't just absurd, it would probably violate any number of copyright and reverse engineering laws.

It just creates the basic empty machine for you and lets you go from there. This is pretty much the experience you get when you build a machine from scratch, so there is nothing "extra" or "Absurd" about it.

re: Multi-monitor fullscreen mode compatibility with Virtual PC 2007

Nick Pearce — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 04:47:09 GMT

Working great thanks. Not to sound ungrateful, but how long until VPC supports multiple monitors for the client OS?

re: Multi-monitor fullscreen mode compatibility with Virtual PC 2007

Virtual PC Guy — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 10:48:38 GMT

Dan Maltes -

I actually agree with your assessment of the new virtual machine wizard. We've been doing a lot of usability analysis of this area for the upcoming Windows Virtualization release. However, due to the need to balance resources we decided to not make significant user interface changes to Virtual PC for this release.

Nick Pearce -

We have no immediate plans for this, but if you are running Vista inside the virtual machine you can connect via remote desktop and use the '/SPAN' parameter to get a multi monitor desktop.

Cheers,

Ben

re: Multi-monitor fullscreen mode compatibility with Virtual PC 2007

Nick Pearce — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 20:23:44 GMT

Ben

Thanks a lot, I'll try /SPAN. Another reason to move to Vista. I know tools such as MaxiVista can help too.

Let me also elaborate on the need for multi-displays in VPC. Platforms such as SharePoint can only run on W2K3. When I want to use XP or Vista as my primary OS, VPC is the ideal tool to support a W2K3 development environment. I find that for serious development, going back to one monitor from 2 or 3 feels so primitive!

Thanks for the work-around. Keep up the good work.

Cheers

Nick

re: Multi-monitor fullscreen mode compatibility with Virtual PC 2007

Wannabe — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 22:50:34 GMT

Is this a feature that must be enabled? When I run a VM in full-screen mode, it still minimizes when accessing the host OS...

re: Multi-monitor fullscreen mode compatibility with Virtual PC 2007

/df — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 16:25:30 GMT

I certainly appreciate this feature in the new VPC but I notice that I can only run one full-screen VM at once. In fact a dialog(ue) box tells me that it's not allowed.

Why would anyone want to have more than one full-screen VM (I can hear the developer say)? Well, if you have the Virtual Desktop Manager powertoy (or similar) running, you have 4 virtual desktops available, so you might want to dedicate 2 or 3 of those to full-screen VMs and use the MSVDM tool to switch between them. How about a little tweak for this in the next version?

re: Multi-monitor fullscreen mode compatibility with Virtual PC 2007

Brian C. — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 21:02:22 GMT

When working in virtual pc with guest os win98se host winxp, i full screen it on the primary display, but if i try to run any applications/games that change the resolution, both montiors primary and secondary are effected. Like vpc monitor makes host os monitor go funky when the game/program makes vpc change resolutions, is there a setting to fix that?

also, you should really emulate a better video card. how hard would a 16mb riva TNT chipset be to emulate on all these new 256mb-512mb video direct x 9 cards

re: Multi-monitor fullscreen mode compatibility with Virtual PC 2007

Matthew Simpson — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 05:40:37 GMT

Odd thing: Using three monitors arranged like:

[ 1 ][ 2 ] [ 3 ]

When placing a VPC window in [ 3 ], it DOES go full screen when asked, however the placement of the monitors suddenly changes, to be like:

[ 1 ][ 3 ] [ 2 ]

IOW, moving the mouse from left to right caused it to move to monitor 1 to monitor 3 and then to monitor 2...

Placing the VPC on montor 1 or 2 works as you'd expect...

re: Multi-monitor fullscreen mode compatibility with Virtual PC 2007

Euan — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 09:20:02 GMT

A very frustrating experience. Its costing me money/time/productivity.

When switching from dual screen to single screen the window doesnt return to the primary screen. And now when I launch VPC2007 it opens, I cant see it and when I click on it in the taskbar it closes.

Very disappointed.

re: Multi-monitor fullscreen mode compatibility with Virtual PC 2007

Dave — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 15:08:28 GMT

>> Thanks a lot, I'll try /SPAN. Another reason to move to Vista.

No need to move to vista. I use XP, the new terminal server client from microsoft update also allows you to use /SPAN, works fine for 2003, xp and w2k.

However as my two monitors are diffrent res's i've gone back to defining the size on the command line so it still spans the two monitors.

Lot's of other OS's support VNC of course and a lot of the free vnc clients also allow you to scale the window. I use this when i'm running test sessions from a number of w2k machines i can watch all 4 machines from just one screen.